If T.S. Elliot had ever seen a Sudbury November, he would never have dared to call April the cruelest month.
There were whitecaps on Ramsey Lake today. Whitecaps, building up in about half a kilometer of open water surrounded by hills on three sides. It snowed, briefly - either that or I somehow shifted into bullettime and just saw some extremely slow raindrops drift down past my window. It is cold, and miserable, and everyone I see scurries around clutching their winter jackets tightly around their necks while simultaneously battling with umbrellas rendered useless by the wind.
As long as I'm actually outside in it, I'm fine. Bring it on, blow ye winds high-ho, I'll raise my head to meet them with my usual snarl of defiant delight. But sitting in my tiny, dingy little residence room, looking out my window at it, with none of my usual comforts to hand? There's the misery, for me. Here in West Res, Laurentian, there is no spa. There isn't even a bathtub. There isn't even a comfortable place to sit and read.
At home, when I wanted to curl up with a book, there were myriad places I could do so. I could soak in the aforementioned spa or tub, I could sprawl out on one of five perfectly comfortable couches, I could recline in my mother's leather easy chair, I could stretch out on my stomach on the big sheepskin rug in front of the fire, I could go upstairs to my own bright, spacious room, with its two big windows and its afternoon sun, and lie in bed.
Here, my bed is a mattress on the floor. It used to be a mattress on a hard wooden platform four feet off the ground, but I got tired of needing to look around for a ladder every time I wanted a drink in the middle of the night, so I moved it down. This had the advantage of freeing up the wooden platform for me to use as a base for my favourite hobby of stacking things on other things - my box pile is approaching epic proportions, and my textbooks are scattered liberally below the monolith like offerings to a cardboard god - and it's not like the linoleum floor is any harder than the wooden platform was. Still, it's a bit lacking in the comfort department, and utterly impossible to read down there. Couches? We have one, in the common area I share with my three suitemates. A fine piece, in the 1990s Second-Rate Rental Property Ikea Knockoff style, with a stiff straight back and inadequate cushions and wide flat wooden arms. There are chairs, too, identical to the couch but slightly narrower. They radiate indignance when I try to sit on them, as though mortified that someone has mistaken them for anything other than display pieces used to advertise the residence as "fully-furnished."
There is nowhere to read. There is nowhere to immerse myself in water - water, which I have lived within sight and touch of almost my entire life, I think I learned to swim before I learned how to ride a bike. We have a small shower. That's it.
I wasn't naive enough to expect luxury from a university residence. But on a night like this, when it's bleak outside and the lights across the lake are sparse and unfamiliar and weak through the rain, it's the simplest comforts of home that I miss. I'm not bothered by the cold, but I can't feel warm here, and that will be a hard thing in the months to come.