It's a sleepy, quiet Sunday afternoon and I have no burning blogging ideas in my head so I thought I would take you on a tour of our current, temporary abode. [I am sure you are on the edge of your seat awaiting this narrative slide show, after which I will pull out my accordion and bagpipe and perform a concert of Sousa marches. Then I will describe what I ate for my last 14 meals. Just kidding. Except the tour. I'm really going to do that.]
As I mentioned before, we're in between houses since our old home sold and closed at the end of May but the next one won't be ready until the end of June. (We're moving within the same town...in fact, in the same neighborhood just two blocks away.)
Luckily, our town has an inn (actually just a motel that's really old) in the center of town as well as some furnished rental apartments that are affiliated with the inn. For the next month we are in the top two floors of an old 3-story colonial. Very charming and turn-of-the-century with a circa 1950s kitchen upgrade and the added modern touches of cable t.v. (we only get basic cable at home), air conditioning (not in our home either...new englanders claim "you only need a/c on one or two days a year" which is a complete and utter lie. Really they just like to suffer the humidity. Bless their/our crusty curmudgeon ways), and wireless internet (absolute bliss).
The house has deep, deep closets that sometimes have a door at the back leading you to surprising places. For example, the closet in the sitting room goes about six feet to the right then goes back to a door to the master bedroom. Surprise, parents! You thought I was in the other room enjoying the novelty and constant temptation + distraction of the ABC family channel but really I'm sneaking up on you! Boo! Several of the closets are perfect for pre-teen/teen moments of I-want-to-be-aloneness since they are practically small rooms themselves.
Besides the master bedroom, there are two bedrooms upstairs in the attic eaves of the house, complete with window seats and gable windows looking out on the trees. Kind of a kids' retreat or dormitory, really.
Yes, I am falling in love with this place. We really don't need any more space than this and it feels wonderfully European to be in a flat at the top of the house. I imagine bicycles with baskets brimming with flowers and bread and the freshest produce. I think of walking to the post office and knowing the shopkeepers' names. I look very cute in these imaginings, too...miraculously younger and thinner with fabulous hair.
I have actually calculated the possibility of living here always and tried to come up with selling points (no utilities! no property tax! maid service twice a week!) to convince Greg. I'm very content in this pared-down, laid-back, semi-vacationing, hyphen-using state of living.
I guess that's the flaw right there. It's not really the place (although it is fine), it's the feeling of being away for a bit. Slowly everything would catch up to me and I would resent the stairs and the basement common laundry and the noise and cigar smells of the neighbors downstairs. But for now, this is the life. [Cue Souza marches here.] Thanks for humoring me...
