Chestnut

 

I found an apartment near Franklin Park, our historic district, on Chestnut. It was the main floor of an old Victorian house divided into two apartments that shared a basement washer and dryer. There were only a few steps up to the front porch or out the kitchen door and down to the driveway and basement.  I thought it was doable and I loved the high ceilings and many huge windows. There were hardwood floors everywhere except the kitchen and bath which were linoleum. The kitchen had a built in lunch counter, but room for a table and chairs as well as a big pantry. 

My bedroom had been the old dining room in the house when it was built and had a beautiful wall of windows that arched out across one wall. I took my drapes from The Arbors and had them altered to fit the front room windows for a mere pittance and I bought lovely rainbow sheers for the bedroom in shades of lavender, pink and white.

I bought an elliptical machine that took me weeks to put together because it was lacking a screw! But I eventually got it together only to discover it required so much strength that I could barely use it. I eventually set this at the curb where anything disappeared in less than an hour! It was like a magic portal for disposing of all my junk.

Here I could walk a short distance to Franklin Park where Adlai Stevenson's old house was, as well as several other old homes and mansions. They had band concerts there in the summer and walking paths throughout where I could walk and listen to books on my portable cd player. I finally listened to the Iliad and the Odyssey while walking here. I also listened to music Andy recorded for me of him playing guitar and singing. Most were cover songs, but some were his own! When he sang it made me think of Elvis Presley. His voice was very clear and beautiful with that slight southern twang that shows up in music.

My upstairs house mate, Carly, came down one evening. She was finishing her masters in speech pathology and wondered if we could share my internet. That worked for me. We got along just fine.

I thought this place was perfect. I made friends with the woman next door who had lived in her apartment for twenty years and anticipated doing the same in mine. Our landlord was best friends with my son's best friend's brother and we might have met in the same social circles so I thought there would be no problems. But he had a habit of just walking into my House mate's apartment without notice and scared her a couple of times because she was sleeping during the day. She was working nights to put herself through school. He would come to mine and borrow my tools to work on something there, but the basement never got any better. I cleaned it myself, knocking cobwebs and spiders off the ceiling and sweeping out the entire basement including the furnace room. It still had standing water most of the time and the spiders were back in days, but he always had an answer. The bathtub had a gaping hole where the overflow used to be and he always said he would fix it, but he never did. I finally used a magnet to hold a vinyl drain cover over it. Otherwise I envisioned bugs crawling up through it while I was bathing. Centipede's were a thing in this apartment.

It always looked nice. He let me use the hall closet in the foyer by the front door for my coats and my bedroom closet was big with lots of shelves, but there were a few quirks. You might not have noticed them if you didn't live there, but if I put a table in the right front corner of the living room, the front legs required a one inch block of wood to make them level with the back legs! And if I sat in my desk chair in the bedroom and leaned a little, I would roll all the way across the room to the other side!

I pretty much attributed these things to the house being so old. I continued to write My Thots and work transcribing Agee's work for Andy. I could travel down to Alabama and feel like the house was safe for a week and I had room for birthday and Christmas celebrations here with my daughter and granddaughters. It was my home! This was the house where Brooke, my granddaughter, gave me the big picture frame where I could put all the family pictures in one place.

When my son's family came to visit from Colorado I felt safe letting my grandchildren sit on the floor and one time I got to take Corra down to the park by myself. We spent the afternoon swinging and watching the squirrels. It was a dream come true.

One day I was baking cookies in the kitchen when I opened the cabinet door and the shelf holding all my glasses and mugs collapsed sending them sliding off the shelf and onto the counter top, then bouncing down to the floor and shattering everywhere! I found pieces of mugs and glasses all the way across the room and even in the living room! Some of them must have bounced off my new iphone breaking the front screen. I told my landlord, because he was the one who built those shelves. He fixed the shelf and offered me the use of his old phone, which I refused. My phone never stopped working even with that big crack, thank goodness.

There was a third person who shared our house, but she didn't have access to the front like we did. She was in a small apartment built off the back, but she did have access to the basement stairs where my back door was. She was a young woman in her early twenties who was so irresponsible. She would knock on my back door until I answered it only to ask to use my phone because she had lost or misplaced hers. Then she would show up to borrow things. She was messy and let her garbage overflow onto her porch and tended to hoard junk on it as well. She made me very uncomfortable and I was glad when she moved. 

I kept my bike chained to the side of the front steps. It really wasn't too noticeable from the sidewalk and then I could ride on days when I didn't want to walk.

One day Carly, my upstairs house mate, came down and asked me if I heard squirrels. I said no, but then she was directly under the attic and I wasn't. It turned out all the eaves fell off the east side roof after a snow and anything could get in up there. Our landlord eventually fixed it, but not for many months and long after I moved out.

Our landlord was used to renting to students and he was kind of a slum lord it turned out. He didn't do anything he didn't have to and counted on students not caring or not being able to do anything about it. Plus he had a strange way of leasing the house that made it awkward to move without violating the lease. You had to sign a lease in the Fall if you wanted to stay, but it didn't start and take effect until May. That required a lot of future planning and juggling of dates if you wanted to move.

When the attic became open to the outside and the water in the basement began to smell moldy I decided to move. I found another apartment, but trying to coordinate its availability and my landlord's lease was hard. I couldn't afford to pay rent to two places at once and place a security deposit at the same time. I tried reasoning with him, but he wouldn't even discuss it. Finally I called my son whose friend's brother was my landlord's best friend. I don't know if it was discovering my son is also an attorney or whether my landlord was ashamed to have his friends know how he did business, but he agreed that if he could re-rent my apartment I could move before the following fall.  This was a small but vital part of me being able to move.

He got another renter and I moved to Ironwood.