I got back last week from visiting my daughter in Portland, Oregon for the
first time since she moved there eight months ago. Just before I arrived, she and two friends had finally left the basement of another
friend’s family home where they’d been living all that time and had signed a lease to rent a house of their own. So I got to see it.
The shelving in their living room is made of two wooden paint-splattered ladders with boards laid between them. Patio lights dangle festivelynear the top. If you want to sit down you can choose a worn yet magnificent green plush sofa in the living room or the floor or someone’s bed. There aren’t any chairs yet. There are rollers and brushes and cans of different colors of paint in each room: purple; deep green; plantain yellow; pale, pale pink.
Seeing my daughter in the midst of moving into her new house brought to mind some of the many places I lived in my twenties. One of them was a three-room suite consisting of a bedroom with one tiny window, a fairly disgusting bathroom and a screened-in storage porch at the back of a good-sized bungalow where the landlady lived with her two teenage kids. My boyfriend was the one who actually rented from her first; over the next few months I moved in bit by bit and hoped no one would notice. One day I finally brought it up with the landlady. “I'm not stupid," she said. "I figured that out a while ago." She told me she was glad to have me and asked if I’d be willing to pay $25 on top of what my boyfriend paid. Not long after that he went back to Texas where he was from and I ended up staying another year. When I moved out I scrubbed the bathroom until it shone. I barely recognized it when I had finished and I wondered why I hadn’t bothered to clean it like that before.
The last place I lived in California was a two room sublet in a third floor flat in the Mission District in San Francisco. The room that faced the street had big windows and a green-tiled fireplace. Every Sunday I bought myself a different color gladiola stalk, set it in a tall vase in front of the fireplace, and watched all week as the blossoms opened one by one. To this day I like buying flowers for myself more than I like receiving them. My last night there I woke from a dream in which I smelled something burning and realized the house was on fire. Moments later I was on the sidewalk with my housemates and the neighbors, watching the flames rise into the fog. I was hardly dressed and shaking from the cold, and then someone set a lovely wool coat on my shoulders. When I turned to say thank you, he or she was already gone.
I lived in more than a dozen different places between twenty – my daughter’s age now – and twenty-seven, when she was born. I wonder what stories she will tell about where she is now and all the places that will surely follow.
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