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, doing your bit for the Toronto housing crisis, is an unhappy boarder.

Sara is sad because she thinks my squat stucco house with four sides of windows, where she rented a room on a lovely 1st of July, 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 in sudden whooshes from the ceiling toward Sara’s chic dark hair, its hairy arms snapping hungrily at the air.

“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 house, on the second floor. Peter, a lovely, soft-spoken teacher and musician, is in the basement apartment. What you need to know about Peter is that when he first moved in he was so sad from some personal problems that Sara worried we would “cry into our blueberries” every morning, that Peter’s tsunami of sorrow would overwhelm the house. My son Kelly, in the bedroom beside Sara’s, shakes his head when Sara and I talk about tears and blueberries. A grounded young man with a quick mind, home between travel and work as a web developer, Kelly is the household pragmatist.

Together we make four, which entitles me to be smugly satisfied that I am on the supply end of Toronto’s rental demand. You’ve heard the numbers. The city’s vacancy rate is under 2 per cent, the worst in 16 years — and that was before our stingy rental stock stretched to meet thousands of new and returning students.

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In his run to be re-elected this fall, Mayor John Tory has promised 40,000 affordable rentals in the next 12 years; Jennifer Keesmaat upped that to 100,000 in 10 years. Meanwhile, entitled, longtime Toronto homeowners such as myself (my former husband and I got into the market in the salad days of the early ’80s, when a three-storey house cost $93K) rattle around in our Miss Havisham manors, empty now with the kids grown. As my colleague Jennifer Wells wrote in April 2017, “there are more than five million spare bedrooms in Ontario, equivalent to 25 years’ worth of construction.” Eighty-five per cent of those aged 65 and over, she reported, are “over-housed.”

I’d like to say that guilt over my greedy set-up is why I opened Mrs. Bradbury’s Boarding House, but the truth is I was having trouble sleeping. The house had been broken into twice, the second time in mid-afternoon as I sorted bills at the dining-room table. My bag was on the window ledge and the thief hoisted himself halfway through the open window before he saw me sitting there. He paused, calculated his timing, and grabbed my bag before I could lunge from my chair. I have to say I admired his follow-through. Always on the lookout for new talent, I didn’t know whether to call for help or ask for his resumé.

After that, I woke up thinking how sad it would be to be murdered. Finding a boarder was a solution to a practical problem. I needed a good night’s sleep.

That’s how my boarding house started, anyway.

My decision to take in roomers was not met with widespread approval. “Mom. No.” My daughter Mary was alarmed by my lack of self-knowledge. I was letting her old room and needed her to box up her kindergarten art projects. “You don’t even like people,” Mary continued. “You especially don’t like people in your own space. Who make messes. And talk to you.” Perhaps I had once or twice terrorized Mary’s friends who specialized in all of the above. I may have been known as Scary Mommy for a couple of their teenaged years.

Laura, my sister who lives nearby, worried about safety. She didn’t get the concept of taking in roomers so I wouldn’t be murdered. Opening my house was opening myself to the dangerous and transient vagaries of the universe. “What you want is a graduate student,” she decided. Laura looks out for me. “Quiet, female. Try U of T housing.” Clear ground rules came up a lot with friends pondering something similar: keep the living room off limits, assign food shelves, no talking in the morning — especially not to me, apparently.

Worse than the character analysis was the pitiless mockery. It’s bad enough being a divorced woman clinging to her satchel of real estate. But on the social spectrum, taking in strangers for money put me somewhere between a madam running a bordello and a bag lady begging for change. Think of those too-genteel boarding-house women fictionalized unsparingly by James Joyce, William Trevor and Arthur Conan Doyle — and believe me, I did. “How’s our Mrs. Hudson?” became a standard greeting. Who doesn’t snicker at an aging woman on the outskirts of respectability?

It turns out, however, that I am now on trend, and so I am progressive and modern instead of marginalized and batty. HomeShare, launched last month in Toronto, is a provincially funded pilot project that takes on “intergenerational home-sharing.” It’s a two-birds, one-stone solution, matching seniors with too much space to roomless students with too little money.

To our south, Generations United and New York University are pairing graduate students with older Americans who have a spare room. The program organizers hope to expand to campuses across the U.S. Nesterly, on the other hand, a Very! Excited! startup website in Boston, is betting intergenerational home-sharing can be a profitable business. “Young people can exchange help around the house for lower rent! Snow removal! Grocery shopping! Walking a dog!”

I have had four roomers so far, and chores around the house are not part of the equation. Like me, they are far too busy. Rebecca, a comedian and screenwriter acquaintance, was my first toe-dab into boarding-house lifestyle. In town for a few months while her hit L.A. TV show was filming here, Rebecca would enter my large wooden front door with a lusty “Hel-oo-oo!” and bang out a couple of tunes on the piano in the pauses between her brilliantly paced stories about shopping for tampons. She even washed her pretty face with gusto. “I’m just performing my ab-LU-tions,” she’d shout from the bathroom.” You knew when Rebecca was home, in other words.

Yulina, Boarder #2, was so quiet I rarely knew if she was in her room or at school. She responded to my ad at U of T housing and checked all of Laura’s boxes. She was working on a Master’s degree begun at the London School of Economics before moving on to work in Frankfurt. Originally from South Korea, she had the far-sighted, not-quite-present look of someone getting ready for her next move — she arrived and departed with the same compact suitcase. After nine months, Yulina was slightly chattier, and to her this was a transformation.

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“Cathrin, can you believe how shy I was when I first came? And how different I am now?” She wasn’t the only one in transition. My hair no longer caught fire if Yulina was already at the kitchen table when I came down in the morning. We even chatted over coffee. By now I was more curious than anything else: Who would be Boarder #3, and how would we rub off on each other?

Sara was next to arrive. She is perhaps the least chore-oriented of the three so far, although not for a lack of willing spirit. Sara arrived with quite a lot of luggage. I was not kind about this. “You are renting a room, not half a house,” I said, and grudgingly agreed to let her add a few of her favourite dishes and pots to my tightly orchestrated kitchen. Ix-nay to her stacks of Tupperware. A shiny white scrub brush she had an attachment to did not pass muster, either. This is the other peril of running a boarding house: You find out the ways in which you are a tool.

One thing Sara did not arrive with was a knowledge of day-to-day practicalities. My son and I have secretly wondered if she is perhaps an Iranian princess. She has a habit of putting gold-gilded china in the oven at 350 F — “Is this what you use to heat your food in?” — and setting small kitchen fires after she puts her dinner to boil on the gas stovetop and wanders off to think. She has a lot to think about. Her doctoral specialty is the interconnectivity of brain tissue.

“What have you learned?” I asked her early on.

“Nothing,” she said, and hid her face in her hands, ever modest. “Imagine standing in the vast ocean with a teaspoon of water in your hand. That teaspoon is how much we know about the brain.”

“Well, it’s kind of like a computer,” Kelly said, and I imagined carrying around the latest Apple upgrade on my shoulders. “The brain is nothing like a computer,” said Sara. “You can’t find a storage bank in a brain, for example.” She and Kelly would discuss this for the next hour.

I gave up a few things taking in boarders: having the bathroom to myself, walking around naked and playing Leonard Cohen full blast. My own space, which turns out to be less valuable than I once thought it was. But as I have gotten to know Sara I understand how much more she has left behind. She never watches The Handmaid’s Tale, for example, because it is too much like modern-day Iran. “My friends and I lived this.”

She swam in the Caspian Sea as a girl, and longs to swim in a northern Ontario lake. One weekend she rented a car and drove north with her mask and snorkel, turning down road after road on Lake Joseph in Muskoka only to end up at the bottom of another cottager’s driveway. She came home defeated. I was terribly hurt by her disappointment, and I began to understand her isolation. Being Mrs. Bradbury of the boarding house, my first impulse was to fix it.

But some things don’t fix easily, and Sara understands this better than me. When she is homesick she brings out her bag of Cheetos — and I mean one bag. She unfailingly offers to share it. “It’s console eating?” she says. “Consolation eating,” I say. It was Kelly who noticed she never eats more than three Cheetos at a sitting. “She’s had that bag for three months.” They are friends now, and will remain so, I think. It makes me happy to come home to them talking about brains or Trudeau or whether crunchy or puffy is the best Cheetos style.

Last Dec. 21, Sara invited Kelly and me to share tea with her to celebrate Yalda, the winter solstice. She prepared sweets, nuts and pomegranate, served with a silver spoon, and three kinds of tea: sour orange blossom, gol gavzaban, and chamomile.

“My father would say I have done it all wrong. The tea is not fresh enough, the colour should be dark red, not black, and so on. He is the master of this.” Sara’s parents remain in Iran. They refuse to suffer the border interrogations and indignities that travelling to North America entails. This summer they met for a holiday in Istanbul, Turkey being one of the few countries to which Iranians can travel without a visa.

Sara came home with two beautifully wrapped teas, from her mother to me. One to calm me down, and one to bring me peace. Apparently these are different, but I felt I needed both. When I wrote Sara’s mother to thank her, I told her what a privilege it was to have Sara in my home.

Yasaman wrote back that she wished she had been in my kitchen to make the tea for me. “I cried when I read the part you wrote about Sara. She is my first daughter and she has made all the dreams I had for her come true. She makes an effort to be the best in every aspect of her life.” This is true. Sara has made me better too, more aware of the way I take my world — my home, my dishes, my access to northern lakes — for granted.

Nesterly, that Boston website, promised more than chores and money if you opened your house to a roomer. “Build New Friendships! Meet Interesting People!” If there are dangers to taking in boarders, I have not encountered them. Instead, the world feels kinder, smaller and more personal. Yasaman closed her letter by inviting me to Iran. I hope to take her up on the invitation, and any more that come by way of boarders.

It’s fall now. I don’t know where that big bug got to, but Sara is no longer entomophobic, as far as I can tell. Perhaps this was my gift to her. And Peter, to our mutual relief, has been infected with our happiness, instead of the other way around.