I hear that people live with other people and are fine with that. It seems improbable, I know. That certainly hasn’t been my experience.

Oh, you do what you have to when you have a family. I lived with my husband for 47 years, 46 of them married, and we had a kid eventually, so there was that. I always made sure everyone had their own room, which made it tolerable, because before I met my husband I had a series of roommates, and having roommates was not a good experience for me.

First, of course, I shared rooms with my sister. This seemed like a good idea to my parents, but not so much to us.

I escaped to college, where my freshman roommate was a sensible, tidy Spanish major who got up at 6:00 am and studied. I slept in my clothes, got up at noon, and ran amok. We rarely saw one another, and my sophomore year I snagged a single and then dropped out and went home to share a room with my sister again and go to art school in my city.

When I was 19, I took myself to Europe for two months of wandering, and when I came back, my sister had moved all my possessions out of our shared room and into the attic, so I persuaded my grandmother to pay for my rent in the city.

My first apartment was the former waiting room in a doctor’s office on the first floor of a row home in Center City. It was curtained off, and my new kitten kept climbing the curtain. The girl whose name was on the lease worked as an artists’ model. I hated the lack of privacy. I didn’t much like the people.

I found a classmate in art school who was looking for a roommate in the rickety, smelly, worn-out row house where she had been living; there, I would have two rooms to myself. Nora had painted all the walls black in the house, and she painted hallucinatory visions in Day-Glo acrylics on canvases she had taped to the walls. Drugs played an important part in her life, and she was rarely there. She moved away to Hollywood, where she married a minor actor and made a living, and left me to figure out what to do with the house.

After Nora, a manic pixie dream girl moved in. She kept borrowing my things. I don’t remember her name. After the pixie was a dour girl whose mother had just died, and who joined Scientology, which sucked out all the money her mother had left her. She was replaced by a chipper girl (Karel) who was full of energy and organization, and who drove me mad. My last official roommate was a guy named Bill, who was dating a former high school classmate, and who was just using the place as a staging area for his possessions because he had just bought a firehouse a few blocks north of me.

At one point, I advertised for another roommate in the newspaper, which was what we did back then. A gentleman called and got to the point of asking me if I was wearing any underwear before I realized he was not on the level.

Which is why, when my new boyfriend Stephen was looking for a place, I moved him in with me.

He started putting his record albums in with my carefully alphabetized collection, and for the rest of his life, he told the story of the volcanic reaction I had about that. It shook him pretty bad. He was sure I was going to kick him out, and he started putting his possessions by the door. For the rest of our time together, we always had separate work spaces, even if we shared a room, because I insisted, and he was never sure I wasn’t going to kick him out.

That is not a bad baseline for a marriage for a solitary person, I realize now. He did keep walking into my study and wanting to chat, which irritated me deeply, but then he usually went up to his own study and let me be.

I do not do well with roommates, is what I’m saying, and this is why, four years after my husband died, the third floor of my house remains completely empty except for some clotheslines, even though it would make sense for me to get some nice young college student to share my house and help me up if I fall down the stairs. Someone who would never be there, and who would be uninterested in socializing. Someone whose name I would struggle to remember.

I’m writing about all this because this week, my adult child, my son-in-law, my grandchild, and their cat are all coming to stay with me for two nights, because they just put in new steps, which have to get stained. My son-in-law is bringing their spare futon mattress over in a couple of hours. I already have a room for my grandchild, with a little bed in it for him in case he ever wants to stay overnight. He never has stayed overnight. I bought a litter pan and some litter for the cat, who will stay in his own room, to keep him from running away and to keep him from frightening my cat Louie.

There will be people in my house.

I mean, they are already here once a week for family dinner, but they’re only here for a couple of hours and then they go home.

Pray for me.