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This will tell you all you need to know about our housekeeping:
I heard a ghastly rumbling whoosh from the upstairs apartment and cast my eyes upward, wondering what the hell was going on up there. The Great Dane scrabbling on the floor? Radiator pipes clattering and flushing? Some new Wii game?
Oh. They’re vacuuming.
Do you ever have that dream where you find a new room in your home? If you have, you know the one I’m talking about: you’re trundling along doing your daily household chores and then — buWHA? — you walk past a door that was never there before. You open it and find a new room, open and fresh and uncluttered. It’s empty, but full of possibilities.
Sigh. I love that dream.
The Fella and I have been kicking around a new floorplan for our dollhouse-sized apartment. And by that, I mean I’ve been graphing out rooms and layouts, and he’s been nodding at them and cheerfully saying, “Sounds great!” and “Whatever you want!” and “I’ll move everything!”
This isn’t as gendered as it sounds, with the suggestion of the fussy little woman who wants to pretty up the house and the gentle lug who silently moves every stick of furniture just a skosch to the left. Indeed, our situation flips some gendered expectations on their heads. I can easily maneuver imaginary items in imagined three-dimensional space and translate graph layouts into actual rooms of furniture, and he cannot, which makes design discussions impractical for us. He’d much rather jump in and move stuff around.
(Of the two of us, I’m also the one with the toolbox, who knows where the hammer is, who got all excited about the cordless drill, who has a nodding acquaintance with the folks at the hardware store, who takes stuff apart to see how it works. When a recent guest remarked that he’d finally got the hang of our awkward bathroom door, The Fella proudly piped up “No! It works now! Elsa fixed that!”)
Still, this new plan does require us to move just about every item of furniture in the place, and by “us,” I mean “him”; even if my back allowed me to drag furniture around, my husband will not. If the new layout doesn’t work, we’ll he’ll have to move every item of furniture back, too.
But for the past day or two, whenever I examine the graphed-out floorplan or look around the rooms and imagine them re-arranged, I get that odd floaty sensation, as if I’m dreaming. As if I’m dreaming the dream of the extra room.
At 4:25 a.m., I dragged myself out of an unyielding bed in an airport hotel in San José, and spent the next 14 hours muddling my way through airports, only to arrive in infamous Logan airport bereft of my checked luggage. Evidently the suitcase so enjoyed the worldly sensation of being waved through Customs that it decided to stay in Miami.
I am even more screwed than you might think: since airport security examined my keyring and advised me to stow it in my checked bag (lest I should yield to the temptation to overthrow the flight crew with an extra-large, blunt-tipped safety pin trinket), I can’t go home until my bag arrives. At 6:00 pm in Boston, they were hopeful that delivery might occur as soon as Tuesday morning.
Yes, that was when I momentarily burst into tears. The young baggage agent looked so distraught that I assured her that I knew she was doing everything she could, and that it must be difficult for her. She immediately brought my file back up on her terminal and pecked determinedly at the keyboard, her phone tucked under her chin.
By the time I arrived at my parents’ house in Maine, the baggage delivery agent, who is not supposed to be working tonight and who further doesn’t deliver to Maine, had left a message to expect him between 2 and 4 am. That young baggage agent is my new hero, followed closely by Curtis the delivery guy. By the time he arrives, I will have been up for nearly 24 hours, but I am determined to thank him (and tip him) in person, and to shower my filthy way-laid bag with kisses before wrapping my arms around it and snuggling down for a long winter’s nap.
Tomorrow, there will be less talk of airports, sleeplessness, and filthy baggage, and more talk about glorious Costa Rica.
My description of the hectic but satisfying week that is (ostensibly) ending today was as remarkable for its dullness as its brevity, so I deleted the whole damn thing. Instead, here are the simple pleasures my evening holds:
Low lights
Undemanding, comfortable music
Schlumphy old clothes
A snowfall on the way
A simple and warming dinner
A dark and luscious treat
Perhaps because the weather has suddenly turned cold, the apartment is overrun with spiders of bewildering variety: wispy gray spiders that seem at first glance to be mere motes of dust, fat black spiders like bloated licorice jelly beans, leggy little chestnut-colored spiders, and even one repulsive white spider, its chitinous body and legs outlined only in shadow as it scuttered across the white wall away from my desperately whacking shoe and toward freedom.
Yes, I am whacking at them. Usually, I am one of those saps who fishes the spider out of the tub on a string or a card, then escorts him or her outside, but instinct took over when the spider I found in the tub was the size of a plump raspberry. A big, black, fast-moving raspberry with a stubborn exoskeleton. Shudder.
Elli
Elsa
