January.
There’s a squirrel darting across the road. Now he’s climbing up the Sycamore tree.
I’m at my window, looking out over a calm, grey day, tree branches swinging slightly in the cold air. The furnace kicks on and off.
Have I mentioned I love it here?
It turns out there was a house to rent just down the block from our other place—at the end of the alley, in fact, the same alley where the girls scattered their nail-polish painted rocks and learned to ride their bicycles. There I was feeling so melancholy about leaving it, but it turns out we didn’t have to leave it after all
For years, I’ve admired this house from a distance. It’s big and old, white with green trim, has large windows and five big trees in the yard—mostly Maples and one enormous old Sycamore. There’s also an apple tree in the back yard with strong, outstretched branches that are perfect for climbing.
All last spring and summer, I saw the owner out in his yard cutting the grass. I couldn’t help but notice the ‘For Sale’ sign had been standing there for over a year. Talking to him one afternoon, I learned that the house was sitting empty—the owner just came to cut the grass every week. So after some thought, I wrote him a note letting him know that if he was looking for renters, we’d love to live in his house. For some reason, I could see us there, the girls climbing the apple tree, me hanging laundry on the clothesline that stretches off the back stoop.
I saw him in his yard again in September, when we learned we needed to move.
“I have an offer on it, but it might fall through”, he said. “If it does, I’ll rent it to you.”
It did fall through.
And so here we are.
The house is bigger than our old house. My writing room is on the top floor, overlooking the street lined with the oldest Maple trees in the city. To the left is the big Sycamore. The branches come so close to the window that, sitting at my desk feels like being in a tree house. In the fall when the wind came up, a flurry of leaves would swoosh past my window and click against the glass. Now the branches are just knobby little limbs, edged with snow.
I look out and think: who knows how long we’ll be here. With renting, there is a temporariness that I’ve come to appreciate. Although it has its uncomfortable aspects, the feeling of impermanence is almost nice: I can’t settle in and numb out. It forces me to remember to enjoy every day I have here. Which applies to….well, everything, obviously.
