The best-laden plans

Moving our son out of his freshman dorm will be a lot more complicated than when we moved him in.

Now that we’ve somehow reached mid-April, most spring semesters at college are about to end—often with draconian deadlines. Which means a lot of parents are planning out the logistics for moving their kid(s) out of college housing, storing their gear over the summer, and schlepping it all back in the fall.

Every situation is different, of course. If you’re really lucky, your child can manage this on their own. But maybe your kid’s college doesn’t allow freshmen to have a car. Maybe you’re divorced and live 800 miles apart, and the campus is at least 300 miles from each of you. Maybe communication hasn’t been as efficient as it could be, because the three of you have exclusively been talking two at a time.

If those maybes apply to you, you might be us! We recommend starting a Substack together and writing about the planning process. It really keeps those communication lines open.

Our plan, such as it is, is coming together. Pickup is pretty straightforward: Magda will drive to campus when we finally learn when the best day to do that will be. Our son hasn’t been a font of information about that, since he’s focused on his finals and registering for next semester’s classes. And that’s probably fine, because it means he trusts us enough to know we’ll all figure this out eventually.

There are some important considerations, though. When we arrived last fall, for example, we were greeted by an army of seniors who helped haul our son’s bundles up four flights of stairs. Since the seniors will be gone, Magda will be depending on the kindness of hallmates (and wondering how much stuff would survive a four-story drop out the window). It's more labor than she thought she’d be expending on a kid out of high school, but at least she’s not receiving disingenuous emails every Friday evening from the derelict school superintendent anymore.

Returning in the fall will be trickier, because when the time comes Magda, Doug, our son, and his stuff will be in four very far-flung locales. We’ll need a meticulous, well-synced plan to make dropoff happen, and at this rate of communication, we might have just enough time to draw it up if we start now.

In the meantime, we’re also thinking about Saturday. We thought it was going to be another big protest, but in many locations it looks like it'll be more of a Day of Service. Regular Americans are into serving others anyway, so this feels like it should be fun. Magda is wondering if it's been warm enough yet for her form of service to be pulling invasive plants from alongside the rail trail near Mike’s house. (She can't tell which plants are which until they start to pop up and bud.)

And Doug is looking forward to the chaos when protesting crowds merge with tens of thousands of football fans leaving America’s largest stadium. What could go wrong?