I removed the previous post for a couple days in fear that someone (i.e.future landlord) would miraculously find my blog and think we would be unfit tenants, but I figured it didn't reflect too badly on me that we have unfolded laundry and some crap on the table. I mean, really, I bet a lot more houses look like ours than I previously assumed.
I remember three apartments ago when we lived in a g-h-e-t-t-o one-bedroom in Aptos, there was suddenly an enormous water stain that appeared on our bathroom ceiling. It was like a gray, dingy cloud that pissed dirty FISHTANK water onto our heads. A smaller, but no less annoying, patch began dripping in the bedroom. I don't remember the how's or why's of the matter, I just remember going upstairs to found out what the hell was going on, and being shocked by what I saw.
In a space no larger than ours (550 sq. ft), there resided two adults, one child, four birds, three rabbits, two tanks of fish, a couple snakes, and a guinea pig. Not only did it house (and smell like) a small menagerie, the place was PACK-RAT central. The family had lived there for at least ten years, the entire life of the child, as she so ruefully explained. There were piles of newspapers, empty aquariums (who they housed, I'll never know), dilapidated children's toys and bicycles, bags of pet feed, a massage table...it made my head hurt and my body instinctually shrink into itself to take up as little space as possible as I shuffled through the tiny alley between the couch and wall to enter the bedroom. Two double beds, a plastic crate with a small television, and more aquariums.
"We clean out the fish tanks by ourselves in the bathroom," the mother said.
These were hefty tanks, with a variety of large, exotic fish--the kind of tank you should have professionally cleaned, or least done in a space bigger than a public restroom toilet stall.
"Uh, did you happen to spill most of it on the floor instead of the tub?" I asked this with genuine confusion, because we never actually figured out what it was that made the nasty sagging ceiling. Just that it happened the day a lake of fish-poo water was emptied into the tub above ours.
I'm also reminiscing about this incident because we're moving again in two or three weeks, and it's inevitable I look back at the gradual improvements of our living arrangements.
There was Zach's college pad with his two roomates--the kitchen counters strewn with empty pizza boxes and Smirnoff bottles; stacks of wrinkled Maxim, Popular Science, and Snowboard Magazine on top of the toilet; the musty smell of unwashed man-clothes hanging in the air. I remember sitting in the bathroom, mesmerized by the assortment of crushed insects on the walls, and realizing that we were out of toilet paper again. Ah, college.
Then there was the daylight basement of a Jordanian family's house. Our bed shared the same (very thin) wall as their washer and dryer. Twice, the entire shower head/connecting pipe shot out at me and Niagara Falls appeared in our bathroom. Another major pipe leakage situation soaked our shelves of food. Our postage-stamp sized kitchen.
Yet, wherever we've lived, we've made it home--hammered nails and hung smudged photos on the walls, created science experiments atop stoves, left rust rings from shaving cream cans in the bathtub. We may not have loved the places themselves, but we loved what we created inside of them.
Wow, this has turned into a long ramble. I'll write about the new place we'll be calling home another time...
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