Mrs. Bradbury's Boarding House

Taking in roommates forced me to share my space, turn down my Leonard Cohen and—I’ll admit—even become a nicer person

- Cathrin Bradbury

I’m sitting at my shiny white kitchen table, round and bright as a happy face, and talking to Sara, my boarder. Sara’s face is not happy, and one of the perils of turning your home into a boarding house is an unhappy tenant.

Sara is sad because she thinks my squat stucco house in Toronto, where she began renting a room in the summer of 2017, is infested with bugs.

“It’s just the occasional fly because I don’t use screens,” I say, waving my hand at the flung-open windows. A summer breeze eddies around us. “So.”

The So is for finality, to get Sara out the door to the University of Toronto lab where she spends long hours dissecting brains for her PhD thesis, because as I speak an enormous insect is rappelling from the ceiling toward Sara’s hair, its arms snapping hungrily.

“But you see here,” Sara’s brown eyes well with worry as she rolls up her pant leg to reveal a large red welt. “It is— what is the word?”

“Oozing,” I say. Sara speaks excellent English, with only an occasional lost phrase. (“I wish you could understand me in Persian,” she once said. “In Persian I’m witty and sophisticated.”)

“It’s just a mosquito bite,” I say, and hope this is true. The Volkswagen-sized bug—are those pincers?—is now inches from her head. “Stop scratching.” As the owner of a boarding house, I am allowed to say bossy things like this.

Sara rents a room in my home, on the second floor. Peter, a lovely, soft-spoken teacher and musician, is in the basement apartment. Until last March, my son Kelly lived in the bedroom beside Sara’s. He’s a grounded young man with a quick mind. Home between travel and work as a web developer, Kelly played the role of the household pragmatist.