All moved in

Turn around right when you enter. That's the messy foyer.


Heading into the apartment, this is your first view. The living room.



The above picture was taken standing in the dining room/computer room, which I now realize I forgot to take pictures of. It's the same size-ish as the living room, and has a table, computer/desk, and this big black metal shelving unit.

Walk through the dining room into the kitchen:






(wall of artwork--Hannah's)


I don't know how big it looks in the pictures, but it's freaking huge.

Bathroom


Laminated (ha!) pictures from a South American fashion magazine




Bedroom, my least favorite room of the house (it doesn't have a welcoming vibe yet)




Oh yeah, I also forgot to take a picture of the backporch, which is soso darling, with lots of plants and sunlight.

Home is where the heart is

Or the Tim, I guess.

I was thinking about living here recently. Maybe it was running into Sally in the grocery store, which made things feel small-town and homey.

I watched the news last night, which reported this new development in a cool section of town. The city razed a rundown block and is planning to build restaurants, outdoor cafes, boutiques, etc, in its place. And a downtown alley near the baseball stadium is being considered as a touristy spot for fountains, trees, and cafes and bars. I got excited--then I realized I wouldn't be here to see it.

They broadcast the opening game of baseball on NBC Thursday, and I watched some of it, to see if I recognized anyone in the stands.

When did this become home? I'm going to miss it. I had no idea I'd fall so hard for a small city (and one so filled with suburban nightmares like strip malls).

This makes me think, maybe I can live anywhere, as long as I have Tim. He makes things bearable, but it occurs to me that what I have here, I created myself. I wake up next to him, and he makes me breakfast, but when I go out in the world, I'm doing it by myself.

In the theatre, I'm his wife. But everywhere else, I'm just me. And it's dawning on me just how much I'm capable of.

Music at home

Last night Fran invited me to an event one of her classmates was putting on. She didn't know many details, so I didn't know what to expect. It was a musical review (revue?) that had been picked up by Broadway recently, a play written by a local singer-songwriter based on Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies.

We walked into her classmate Joe's tall, Colonial home, into a big living room stripped bare of furniture, filled with people watching a man on bass and a woman on guitar, singing. They did a few songs, then other people picked up instruments and moved into what I think was the dining room, filled with amps and microphones. A tiny boy dressed in a flaming cowboy shirt, snakeskin boots, and a black ten-gallon that fell to his nose swaggered out, carrying a guitar that covered most of his body. He was 7, and a Hank Williams impersonator. It was really the most precious thing I've ever seen. His singing was, well, you know, he's seven. But I was blown away by how his teeny fingers hopped from chord to chord with ease--he didn't even have to look! (Sometimes I have to look.)

The crowd was mostly grandparents and middle-aged folks when we arrived, but as the night went on, a younger crowd started showing up, and it was clear by the time we left that an afterparty was brewing in the backyard. Joe's friends seemed like the type I would enjoy. He seemed to be about my age, very personable and good looking, goateed, with a poplin fedora, thick silver ring on his pinky, and trendy pointy black shoes like I'm always trying to interest Tim in.

Fran and I mostly stuck to watching the music, and talking to Joe whenever his rounds would place him in our vicinity. He introduced us to his friends once, and they seemed really cool, but we weren't feeling that social. It was fun for me just to get to hang out with her. The music was easy to sit back and listen to. I haven't been able to hang out and listen to live country or folk in a long time.

Towards the end of the evening, Joe played a few songs. One of them, "Valentine," stuck in my head like a burr in cotton. I knew it front to back, but couldn't remember from where. I asked, and he said, "Old 97s." Of course. I started talking about music, and as soon as the words "alt-country" left my mouth, I could feel the light go on inside me, and I knew if things were different, in my old life, that would have been the moment when the evening changed, and lengthened, the water in my hand would have become a beer, then another, and the crowd would thin, then disappear, and eventually, I'd tiptoe out the next morning in the bright sunlight with a phone number in the back pocket of my jeans.

Musicans get me every time.

In a much more wholesome way, the night reminded me of being a kid and going to the Music Emporium for concerts. It was a dusty music store that would open its storage space in the back on weekends for shows. It started out small, a potluck dinner, people sitting on boxes or bringing their own lawn chairs. The kids would run around in the front where the instruments were, and try to count all the frog trinkets and figurines (plus the lazy cat named Frog who slept in plush guitar cases) that the owners collected. I once spent a concert sketching the guitar player bent over playing. I remember the folds of his workshirt and the smooth, reckless curve of the instrument were my favorite parts to draw. My parents pushed me up afterwards to present him with the picture. I was probably eight or ten.

The evening made me think of how I want my home to be someday, filled with laughing people with a beer in one hand and an instrument in the other. I want to host evenings like this, in our spacious home somewhere--preferrably in the middle of the country with a wide porch and a living room big enough for dancing. I want to draw creative people to me with temptations of my cooking, and Tim's love of playing music.

It was a really wonderful evening.

When I was a kid

When I was a kid, we didn't have running water in the house. I would open the bottom windows of my bedroom late at night and pee in the grass because I was scared of the outhouse after dark.

When I was a kid, my best friend's phone number was 2-2850. As in, 382-2850, but you didn't need to dial the first part of the prefix because we lived in such a remote, unpopulated area. We had a party line, which meant we had to listen carefully to the kind of ring the phone made, because the call might have been for our neighbors down the road, the Bakers. Sometimes we'd pick up the phone to make a call and we'd have to wait because they'd be talking to someone.

When I was a kid, my dad taught industrial arts at a high school that was widely known to be filled with deliquents. He'd come home after a stressful day and chop the heads off a few chickens. I remember watching them run around in the yard, headless.

We ate a lot of chicken, when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, we would raise one pig a year. My dad would bring home huge trays of slop from the school cafeteria to feed it. He says that when he'd butcher it, I'd hang out in the barn, watching. I don't believe that, though, because all I remember is racing back to the house the morning of slaughter and burying my head in pillows so I couldn't hear the crack of the gunshot. I remember rendering the fat, filling plastic gallon jugs with pure white lard to be frozen and used later for frying, and the golden cracklings piled into cheesecloth.

When I was a kid, I really wanted to believe that the reflection on the windows of kids riding the bus was really an alternate universe filled with fairies.

When I was a kid, my best friend and I decided we were going to be psychic, and shuffled two packs of cards together, trying to guess whether or not the next face-down card was black or red. We determined any success to be a sure indicator of our psychic ability.

When I was a kid, I pulled warm eggs from underneath crabby hens, and held eggs while ducklings pecked their way out.

When I was a kid, I dug up a rusted pistol from the garden. Another time, I dug up a salamander in the asparagus bed. I went back there every day to dig him up again and play with him until he wised up and found a different home.

When I was a kid, I hung out in the tunnel stream under the railroad while a train thundered above. Once I holed up during a pasture burning that trapped me there until the flames on the rail banks died down.

When I was a kid, I'd take my fishing pole down to my favorite spot on the creek and cast all day, without any hook.

When I was a kid, I fell down the stone steps of our cave and cracked my skull. The cave was where we went during tornados, unless it was knee-deep with flood water and snakes.

When I was a kid, my favorite smell was my mother's fresh baked whole wheat bread.

When I was a kid, our babysitter made chocolate chip cookies with us. We had a scary stove back then. When she stuck a match to light pilot, a big lobe of blue flame rose out of it. I'd never seen that in the times I'd watched my parents light the stove, so I tried to blow it out. The stove exploded. It blew out a few windows all over the house, and singed off the hair on our faces.

Babysitters never came back twice, when I was a kid.