Just Trying to Stay Warm

When asked about the seminary students my parents were expecting to host at their home during last weekend's "Rural Retreat" (a program through which Wartburg seminary students stay with local families in order to learn about and experience a farming community lifestyle in preparation for their professional lives), my mother replied "I don't know anything about them, except that we've got the one with a cat allergy" (as though this was a personality flaw) and "All I know is that he better not be allergic to feather downs." 

Before you receive your freshman housing assignment, you are required to fill out an extensive survey to allow the Freshman Dean's Office to create a rich, diverse, and enjoyable experience for first year students.  The Dean himself was rumored to have spread all these surveys across the floor of his office, spending long hours agonizing over these pairings before finally placing them their first year homes around the Yard.  As I filled out my survey, my mother chimed in "Tell them you'll be bringing a feather down.  You don't want a roommate who is allergic to feather downs.  Tell them.  Tell them!"  So I did.  Under important things about me, I wrote "I will be bringing a feather down to college."  (For full disclosure, I should have probably mentioned that it was from Germany...)  I can't imagine what the Freshman Dean thought when he read that, but I don't know how he could have created a less compatible experience for four Harvard freshmen.  In hindsight, I wish I had never mentioned the feather down, I blame it for all the unpleasantness that transgressed in Holworthy West #8, but I suppose it is better than the hypothetical alternative: after nine months of constant sneezing the roommate I love finds out the materials of my bedclothes.  "You have a feather down!?  Why wasn't that the first thing you told me about yourself!?"