We are moving. We bought our first house and we are moving out of our first apartment.
Anyone who has ever visited our apartment knows my complaints (you know…bed in the living room/kitchen, having a living room/kitchen, having a hotel-sized kitchen, ONE cupboard, two square feet of countertop, light over the kitchen that doesn’t work, no windows, centipedes, street parking, not being able to order delivered food because we live in a non-existent cave world, bobsled-run hill to walk down in the winter…to name a few).
But as we’re beginning to move out of the very first home we made together and have lived in for one and a half years, a few things have become aware to me that I will miss when we leave our little cave.
**This was going to be a Letterman-style top ten list—but I’m not sure I actually have ten, we’ll see.
Of course, the most obvious: Ann. Our landlady and wonderfully crazy upstairs neighbor. She wears robes AT ALL TIMES. She is a millionaire. She drives a Jaguar (That’s pronounced: jag-you-are). Her glasses chain has CHARMS on it. She is our very own Betty White. Only crazier. In the winter, she keeps the house around 100 degrees. In the summer, 25. We will miss her immensely.
The heater in our entry way that blows warm air on the coat rack directly below it. When I’m getting ready to go out into the cold each morning, I put on a coat and scarf that is nicely toasted.
Our Harry Potter closet under the stairs. If it wasn’t the only closet in the apartment, I would empty it out and turn it into a reading nook. Or put our bed in it and really be like Harry Potter.
The map. One entire wall is covered in a map from around 1970. It includes the USSR and Communist China. And Greenland is spelled “Gronland” since it belonged to Denmark at the time of the map (and maybe still does, who knows, geography is in that science category for me) and the “o” in Gronland has a line through it—so it looks like it said “Groinland,” which both amuses and confuses our company. The map also has pins in all of the places Ann has traveled—and several in places where Mike liked to think Ann has traveled.
And the number one thing I’ll miss about our apartment when we move to a real house is: the barn wood walls in the entry way. And the green pole provided for Amy when she came to visit.
