THE BOARDERS chapter 159

We got two girl boarders from outside of the greater LA area. They were quiet and pretty much stayed to themselves. We made breakfast available, but neither ate much and usually ate nothing. They were allowed to fix their own sack lunches and didn’t even do that much. We also planned to have them with us for supper. It took awhile before they had their first supper with us, and after tasting Della’s cooking we had them more often.

The girls rarely stayed in town on the weekends. They went home. They both had cars so getting around was pretty easy.

They were very easy boarders. Since I biked to school and always had an 8:00 class, I never saw them in the mornings. Della said she rarely saw them either. They were very good at telling us if they would be home for supper. After a few weeks they purchased lunch meal tickets at the college and stopped packing lunches altogether. If they were with us for supper they were both there. Never just one!

The girls were strangers to one another but got connected rather quickly and appeared to be best friends. It was obvious they really wanted to be in a dorm on campus, but there was no space. They would talk about hoping they could get in second semester, but that didn’t happen. We had them for the whole year. That was good for us. We needed the money. Since we were charging them for meals as well and they rarely ate with us we had a little more than we planned on. We felt their departure at the end of the school year.

They pretty much kept to them selves. The biggest problem we had was our children knocking on their door.

Since they had their own bedroom they never entered the house through the bedrooms hallway. We finally got the kids to stop knocking on that door. They could enter the kitchen through a door to their bathroom. So the children moved to knocking at that door. We got that under control and then the kids found out they had an outside door and would go to that one. They didn’t do that too often and the girls were good about giving them some time. They would play with them in the backyard.

Neither of the girls were great conversationalists. We did out best and tried to avoid the most boring question of all - \”How was your day?” We could get them to talk about school when I would tell stories about school.

You knew winter had come when the temperature dropped to about 60 degrees. Not the least bit cold to a Canadian. I did wear a sweater on some of the cooler winter days. What surprised me was that the students were showing up to classes wear the same kind of winter coats as the Canadians – parkas and down filled jackets. What annoyed me was that they would plant themselves by the classroom windows, keep their nice heavy warm coats on and the windows shut. I could hardly take the wintertime heat in the classrooms. When I told that story the girls jumped into a lively discussion. That was one of the first times they began to really interact with us. They wanted to know more about Canada and what the kids wore, where we lived, where we were going and why we were here.

We had plied them with enough questions to know they were both planning to be teachers so that opened the door to a field of discussion that had previously been closed.

As good as they were, we didn’t miss them when they left any more than they missed us. It wasn’t bad, but it was a strain having two boarders and two preschool kids. It was the hardest on Della. There were a few times they said they would be home for supper, and didn’t come. I didn’t mind eating left over’s of anything Della made, but she didn’t like having them. She was glad to be relived of that stress.