Flotsam

I didn’t post last night, which is just as well. If I had, it would have been whiny and sauced with hysteria, topped by a generous garnish of maudlin. If you like, you can recreate my Thursday evening yourself—it will be fun! Like a science experiment!
Directions: Take one girl, who has never been ecstatic about her looks, add an endocrinological disorder that takes her from 98 to 150 pounds in a year, and show her pictures of herself. The result will be shock and disorientation, then panic, followed closely by gulping sobs, a frantic round on the elliptical trainer, the contemplation of taking up crime fighting in order to have the option of covering her face with a mask, and finally, being held by her significant other while she wails “I w-w-wish I were p-pr-prettier!”
Anyhow, if I had followed up my last post about my period with a post about wishing I were prettier, I would probably have woken up this morning to find that Flotsam was now being sponsored by The Oxygen Network and Cathy comics, and I couldn’t let that happen.
So. Lets talk about something else. My move, for instance.

The Nearly and I have lived in the same apartment for the past two years. It has lovely hardwood floors and original woodwork, granite countertops in the kitchen, built-in bookcases, and a large sunroom we use as an office. Our neighborhood is a rapidly gentrifying area of St. Paul near the cathedral—lots of scrumptious restaurants, old houses in the process of being restored, and colorful characters like the old man with the oxygen tank yelling in Navajo, and the knife brandishing occupants of our dumpster. Sure, one of the residents of our building was recently assaulted 10 feet from the front door, but mmmm—homemade cherry vodka from the Russian place across the street!

However the expense, it is killing us. Or, rather, it is killing me that we spend so much money on housing with no equity to show for it. We pay more in rent a month than many people pay for their mortgage—lets just say something over $1000.
So we started looking at houses. Now, I know you east and west coasters will scoff at the notion, but the Twin Cities housing market is horrendously high-priced. We could afford a lovely house…an hour outside of the city. Or, alternatively, in a neighborhood in which I would need an armed bodyguard to accompany me after dark. And of course there is the fact that we may end up moving in two years, when I start grad school.

Last Saturday, the Nearly and I were dog-sitting for my mother. My mother’s house is in a sheltered neighborhood in St. Paul called St. Anthony Park. SAP is like a small town nestled inside the city—vintage houses, trees, a park, a miniature Carnegie library, and a cluster of small businesses (Bookstore! Wine shop! Coffee house! Market! Restaurant with creamy tortellini from God!). The atmosphere is very Stars Hollow. The neighborhood has its own newspaper, an elementary school, and a disproportionate number of professors due to the proximity of the University. It is also so far out of our price range, you would think the houses were carved from gold and ivory, and encrusted with golf-ball-sized diamonds (they’re not, by the way).
Where was I?
Oh yes, last Saturday. The Nearly and I were in the wee market near my mother’s house, buying supplies for the next day’s Confabulous, when we saw an ad on the bulletin board. For a duplex, two blocks away. For $250 dollars a month less than we are paying now.
I called that afternoon to set up a showing for the next morning.
“What’s your name?” asked the woman on the phone, and when I told her, she asked “Did you ever work at Manning’s?”

To make what is becoming a very long story short(er) I did indeed once work at Manning’s–a diner that used to be where there is now the aforementioned coffee house, across from the aforementioned bookstore and wine shop. One evening when I was seventeen, a woman and her husband came in with a nine-day-old baby in a sling. I wasn’t actually their waitress, but I kept bringing them water/napkins/coffee as an excuse to look at what was the tiniest human I had ever seen. The parents were very young and hip, and the first parents I had met who were still…interesting-seeming (I was seventeen, after all—I didn’t yet believe in life after children). They became my regulars at the diner, and I became their babysitter. I moved away for school a few years later, but I ran into the mother several times over the subsequent decade, and we were always delighted to see one another. She is a freelance writer, their first daughter has grown shockingly (to me) old, and they now have a second biological daughter, as well as recently adopted twin boys from Africa.

And now they have bought the duplex next door to their house and are renting it out.

And we are moving in on June 1st.

To say that this feels like a miracle of serendipity doesn’t begin to cover it. Our new home is four doors down from the coffee house, on a quiet beautiful street, in the top half of an old blue stucco house. There are two vast and sunny main rooms separated by a wide arch–rooms with hardwood floors and an entire wall of windows. There are two bedrooms, one for me and the Nearly and one to be used as an office, or, later, perhaps, as a room for a…small person. There is a sizable kitchen and a not-so-sizable bathroom and more closets than we need. There are graciously arching trees. There is a backyard–something we have never had, and there are FREE LAUNDRY FACILITIES.

There will also, I am certain, be an opportunity for you all to see first-hand the havoc that moving wreaks upon my nervous system, but I shall not think about that now.