Anniversary

In the craziness of last week, I forgot an anniversary of sorts.

Last week was the five-year anniversary of my having my house. (Of the literal moving-in. I took posession of it over a month earlier but there were renovation issues including a disappearing contractor. Actually, in retrospect, it's kind of amazing it was only 6 weeks between purchase and moving-in).

Prior to then, I had spent most of my adult solo life in apartments. Apartments have their good points (you can call the management and as long as they're not slum-lords, they come and fix things. Which is a big relief when it's 100* out and your air conditioning dies, to just be able to call someone and they come fix it, no questions asked, no charge to you). But apartments also have their bad points - the main one being the close proximity of other human beings, some of whom, to put it politely, are f-ing nuts.

I once lived in an apartment where the woman who lived above me had very loud New Age music as her alarm clock. And she sometimes forgot to un-set the alarm when she went away on the weekends. It's very particular horror to listen to loud, distorted-by-its-passage-through-her-floorboards Enya for six hours on a rainy Saturday. And then when she moved out, there were the cheerful Korean guys who used to take on minor home-repair tasks at 2 am. I mean, I sympathize with them on some level - they were chem majors and their daytime life was dominated by lab, lecture, and probably (based on the couple times I tried talking to them) ESL classes, but still - 2 am and hammering are not two things I want in the same reality.

And most recently - the guys who lived above me were fond of flicking their cigarettes off their balcony and seeing if they could land them in my potted plants. Or they left their nasty half-drunk beer cans out and they "magically" disappeared from their balcony (only to "reappear" on my patio, meaning I had to clean them up, because my patio was only accessible from my apartment, and I wasn't marching up there and walking them through my place to pick up their dead-soldier Keystones).

There was also the issue of laundry. The laundry room was SUPPOSED to be open from 8 am to 11 pm; very often on Saturday (my only viable day to wash clothing) it wouldn't be opened until 10 or 11. And trying to do laundry when I got home in the afternoon was pointless - people would put stuff in the washers or dryers and Never. Come. To. Get. It. And I'm not gutsy enough to dump someone else's wet clothes on the floor, although I've seen others do it. (And there were no tables in the laundry room - so if stuff was left, it was floor or leave it in the machine).

It also skeeved me out a few times to do my laundry in the common machines; I once found a bloody band-aid that I KNEW was not mine mixed in with my clean clothes. And most of my clothes were not bleach-compatible so I couldn't dump a cup of Clorox in the machine with them. I just washed my stuff on the hottest water it would stand and prayed I didn't get any kind of horrible skin parasites.

But the last straw came with the HUD inspection. Because the apartment I lived in - like all the apartments in town at that time - was Section 8 housing (which always made me wonder: wasn't "section 8" the clause that Klinger was trying to invoke to get himself bounced out of the army? Something to do with insanity or perversion? Or at least dressing up in women's clothing?) So we had to have annual HUD inspections. And because I was in a first-floor apartment, close to the manager's office, I always got inspected.

Well, one year - the last year I lived there - the HUD inspector had a problem.

Her problem? I had "too many books" and they constituted a "fire hazard."

Um - how? Is this person not aware of Fahrenheit 451, so named for the flashpoint of paper? Trust me - if it got up to 451* F in my apartment, something more is wrong than my books being a fire hazard. I also do not smoke (I would hope she could guess that from the lack of ash trays, cigarettes, and smoke smell in the place), nor did I keep candles in the place.

The apartment manager threatened to fine me, but then turned around and said, "oh, you could just rent a storage unit and put the books in storage..." And, as it turned out, it was a company the apartment management owned that she suggested.

I was MAD. I was also sad and depressed - sad that I might have to send some of my precious books into exile (And the last time I stored books? There was a leak in the unit and about half of them were ruined. And the management company of the storage place shrugged and said "Act of God" and refused to pay anything - even refused to refund my rent for the month the soggy books sat in there, getting wet again and again every time it rained, and growing mold).

And also - I suppose it says something about the HUD inspector and what she usually sees.

You must understand - do NOT visualize a Collier Brothers type situation here. Yes, I have a lot of books - but also, in those days, I had enough bookcases for them all. They were neatly arranged and all in their places. The apartment was quite open and airy.

However - one of the apartments I toured when I was looking for a place to rent is probably more typical of the college-town apartments the HUD person sees. This place had no kitchen table or chairs (I guess the inhabitants either ate out, or sat on their large sectional sofa to eat). There were no bookshelves; the few textbooks the students had were stacked off to one side on a coffee table. The main furniture were beds in the bedrooms, a large sectional sofa, a glass topped coffee table, and a gi-normous screen television.

No posters on the walls. No trinkets or tchotchkes anywhere. No books. There may have been a stereo but I don't remember seeing it.

The apartment depressed the hell out of me - it looked like a crash pad - a place where people would go to sleep and maybe have sex and watch tv, but they did't really live there - it wasn't HOME.

And I suppose for some of the students that's okay, many of them go to their "real" home on the weekend. But remember: I was gearing up to move farther away from my family than I had ever lived, to move to a place where I knew no one, and the sterility of that apartment made me want to weep.

So - when I moved, I brought my books and my craft supplies and pictures of my family and plants and all that stuff, and put it in my apartment so I felt like I existed in the world instead of being some kind of a wraith who was merely passing through.

And HUD didn't like it - too much clutter.

Well, I decided then and there that HUD and the apartment management could both suck eggs, I was moving out (And I always paid my rent on time or before the due date, unlike many of the other tenants - I know, because I saw the management out knocking on doors and telling people they were so many weeks late with the rent). And I paid full freight (remember, this was Section 8 housing so many people paid a reduced rate. I was probably subsidizing some of the renters).

Well, it took a lot of searching but I finally found a place through a friend.

A small, two-bedroom, one-bath bungalow type house on an area that used to be called "Faculty Row," because it used to be mostly faculty who lived here (Now, I am the only one, which is kind of sad). Probably built in the 1930s or 40s but it was extensively renovated about a dozen years ago. I bought it, dealt with the current renovation issues, painted, and moved in.

And you know - it's a continual source of delight to have my own house. I'm able to withstand the occasional irriations of furnaces that need work, or neighbors whose damn dog barks at me every time I go to my garage, or the property taxes I have to pay.

Just some of the nice things about the house:

all the interior doors have the old glass doorknobs. And they're big heavy doors, not the sort of hollow-core plywoody doors that were in the house where I grew up.

there are hardwood floors throughout the house. One thing I said I wanted when I was looking for a house was hardwood floors. Too many of the cheaply made "new" houses here are basically concrete slabs with carpet pasted over them.

The rooms, though few in number, are large and are pleasing in their proportion. I have a huge living room that's more than half the size of my first studio apartment. So many of the "new" houses I looked at were carved up into rabbit warrens - the modern need for every child to have his own bedroom, even in small cheap houses, means you have rooms that kind of resemble jail cells. I'd rather have one room to serve as the living room, library, family room, and den, and have it be large, than to have tiny 8 by 8 rooms to serve each purpose.

My house has many large and well-placed windows. I need natural light in my house. One of the things - in retrospect - that depressed me about my apartment were that the windows (all 2 of them) were small, and the sliding glass doors onto my patio let in little light because they were overshadowed by the balcony of my floor-above neighbors. The house I own was built before houses were expected to be "tight" and "energy efficient" so instead of the tiny mingy windows modern houses have, it has large nice windows. And they go down close to the floor. The house my brother owns - it has these weird "eyebrow" windows, where the bottom sill is like 6 feet off the floor, and so if you're short, you can't see out without standing on a chair. I never understood that - I suppose it's either a privacy thing or a energy efficiency thing. But I've never felt the need to walk around my house in the altogether, and I don't need the house at an even 72 degrees year 'round - I set the furnace at 65 or so in the winter and the air conditioning at 78 or so in the summer (well, in truth, colder than that at night) and just deal with the fact that seasons exist. (I do someday want to have new windows - ones that are easier to open and close and clean - put in. But I am NOT going to do what befell a nice older house in town, where they took out the old windows and then closed up 80% of the window opening to put in tiny new windows. That house now looks like it squints and it makes me sad when I drive by it).

The lawn is just right in size. I can mow it in 1/2 hour or less even using an old fashioned push mower. I don't need a big lawn but it's nice to have my little lawn.

The kitchen is big and light and open and it's easy for me to cook in there. My apartment kitchen was a galley-style and it was dark and depressing and there was no counter space. And in the first apartment I lived in, I could see the dirty dishes in the sink when I was lying in bed (it was a studio, or what is more commonly and depressingly called in the midwest, an "efficiency"). I realize that a lot of people live that way, but it always got me down that I could see the kitchen sink from my "bedroom."

In the house I own now, everything is on one level. I can easily get my clothes to the washer and dryer from my bedroom where I change, and bring them back again when they're clean.

And the washer and dryer. I have my own laundry room. That is a marvel in itself. That is something I am thankful for every Thursday or Friday evening when I do the couple loads of laundry I've accumulated during the week. If I don't take the stuff out of the dryer - if I leave the house with stuff in the dryer - it will still be there when I get back. I never wind up opening a washer to see a load of someone else's unmentionables. And no more planning and figuring and conniving to have enough quarters. (And no more draping things all over my bathroom to finish drying when the cheap apartment complex dryers conked out because they were all full up with lint deep inside them).

One thing about everything being on one level - I can hear all the appliances. You'd think that would be annoying but I find it comforting - to hear the dryer running at night if I've put in one last load before going to bed (although I COULD do without the end-of-cycle buzzer). The furnace kicking on (I have a gas furnace, so there's a very particular sequence of sounds - a sort of revving noise, then a click, then a WHOOSH as the gas lights, then the revving quiets down, and finally, the fan takes over to blow warm air throughout the house). The water heater - which is on the opposite side of the wall where I have the head of my bed - gurgling in the night after my shower as it fills back up. Sometimes when everything else is quiet I can also hear the hum of my refrigerator when it kicks on.

Most of all, though, is the fact that the house is MINE. I mean, literally mine - I was very lucky in that I got it for a VERY good price and I was able to use the remnants of an inheritance from grandparents, plus a generous gift from my dad, plus $10,000 I had saved up myself from my paltry teaching-assistant checks when I was in grad school (I lived with family for part of the time so I didn't have to pay rent). And I bought the house outright. It is mine. My name is on the deed. I have all of the paperwork locked away in my safety deposit box. And that's a good feeling - knowing that I have a roof over my head that I own and paid for.

And not to be all flag-wavy, but also the fact that I live in a country where a single person - a woman at that - can own her own house. And that no one thought it strange or odd or wrong that I was buying a house as an unmarried woman. That no one said, But dear, why not wait a few more years and see if you get a husband? And that neither my father nor my brother nor any other male relative had to sign on my behalf - that the paperwork is all signed in my own hand, with my own name.

And every night, when I come home and lock first the screen door, then the big heavy oak door, behind me as I enter my house, I breathe a sigh of relief and send up a little prayer of thanks for this place - this bastion - that keeps me warm and dry and safe and also provides me a place to escape from the outside world. The place where my books life. The place where I sleep at night. The place where I fix my meals and do my laundry and watch television and knit and sew and do my embroidery.

And that no one can EVER tell me again that I have too many books.