move

click photos to see things life size.

we got ourselves a new home. it's quite a bit different from the old one. instead of being an apartment on the whole first floor or an old house, seven rooms with windows on all sides (13, facing out onto leafiness) it is a 3rd floor apartment, one of sixteen in an old limestone row house, with a single window in each of the four small rooms. oh, and a strange window between the bedroom and living room. there is a fire escape. there is an intercom. there is a peephole at the front door. we are shifting from 1300s square feet to about 500 square feet. and at first this seemed scary to me but the more we pack (and the more we toss out or sell) the better it seems. there are quite a few plusses to the new place, including a half block walk to the most wonderful park in the country. and three nearby falafel places. and dub pies. oh, dub pies! but it's the small things that really stand out.

in the kitchen, we have a fridge that works. and over next to it is a sink that is sealed and properly plumbed. the counter, instead of being pieces of leftover marble decal on fiberboard is a real countertop. the backslpash is sealed to the counter. for real. i mean it. and then there's the cooking arena. there's a light above it. there's an exhaust fan, too. and i'm willing to bet that if you set it at 350 degrees that's exactly where it cooks, within 50 degress or so. that will be quite new. there's a dishwasher. i think i've already spent time on the glories of that. the cabinets, though few, are hung straight so they never, ever seem to be looming above a person ready to fall. there's also an awesome fire escape and right off the side of it is a real live clothes line. the whole back courtyard is right out of sesame street, really- fire escapes and clothes lines and a few skinny trees. down below there are patios with chairs and potted plants.

the living room is very simple. a rectangle with a window at either side, one to the outside world, one to the bedroom. it has molding, which is plain but pretty. it has electrical outlets on every wall. each has a face plate and each one works. there is also an overhead light right in the middle of the room and a switch at the kitchen door and another over by the hall to govern the working of this light. this is the sort of luxury we're used to only in a fancy place upstate.

the bedroom is smaller, nearly square with a little windowed alcove. it has many of the amenities of the living room, including those working outlets on each wall and the mysterious window to the living room (okay, it's for ventilation and is historically sort of interesting). the one thing that's missing is the sound of the q train roaring ten feet from our bed as we sleep at night and then the sound of the b train joining it at five minute intervals (that's two trains, two directions, for four trains every five or so minutes) during rush hour mornings. i don't know how we'll sleep through the quiet... there are no bars on the windows. our old landlord put bars on two sides of the house and then on the bathroom window (the highest window in the house) so this will be our first time sleeping in a room without bars in a very long time. there's got to be something symbolic in there.

the bathroom is tiny. so i ask you, what's there to do in a bathroom? how much space do you really want? in our old aparment, there is a recessed radiator that cannot be cleaned. there are dustbunnies older than either nephew scrunched up behind the thing. there is no whipped cream texture on the walls in this new place and the tub does not have huge gashes or scratches in the cast iron from a landlord's past attempts to repair something. the medicine cabinet opens. it closes. there are hinges of some sort, a magnificent idea. there are no sliding panes of mirror on tracks that don't work. there are no huge cracks in the glass. there are no holes in the whipped cream ceiling patched with metal plates. and it's pink. oh, i might have forgotten to mention that the seal between the tub and the tile above it sealed with something waterproof. we don't have that at the old place. that's sort of nice.

the doors throughout the apartment open and close. when you open them you do not need to put the whole force of your body behind your work. and when you close them, they stay closed. they seem to have this thing called a latch in the doors somewhere near the knobs. they keep the doors closed. that's pretty neat. we didnt' so much have that on doors here at the larger apartment. also, the windows all open. and then they close. and then they open again. each one has a screen. a screen that actually fits the window it's in. and then there are the views. if you walk out the front door you are in a wonderland of old, turn of the century limestone and brownstone buildings, leafiness and park. but we are in a back apartment, a courtyard one. and the view from our windows is mainly into a scene that is, to me, a country child, mysterious and hypnotic. fire escapes and clothes lines. the city at its most elemental. and so, like our last place, we have everything.

i know folks say you don't know what you've got until it's gone, but i suppose it's also true that you don't know what you were missing until you have it. we had no idea the relative luxury the rest of the world was basking in. we've had space, but not much else. i mean, the stove has a light on the inside and a window so i can see the food from the outside of the oven. from outside the oven! we will have our own mailbox and a mailbox key. and we have a landlord who actually hired a building manager. a person whose only job is to keep our building in decent shape. i have lived in this big old house longer than i've lived in any one place in my adult life, as long as i lived in the home my parents live in now. i will miss the space and will miss the neighborhood, especially a kind neighbor who offered his basement as storage for us if we needed it. but this new place will require a little work of us all, me and the sweetie and the dogs. it is high time we had a bit of a challenge.