apartments

Places we reside

A girl drawing with chalk on an outdoor terrace, with chairs and a bike behind her. Tropical plants and trees frame the buildings.

In the fall of twenty four we move apartments and I remember how much the place we live shapes our view of the world. I remember how much the things we discover and the ways we relax are shaped by our physical space, its location, and our attention to its decoration. In leaving our old place I say goodbye to the view, and to the neighborhood. In smaller ways I say goodbye to the quiet corners where I sat leaned against the floor to ceiling windows and to the balcony sized perfectly for the folding camping sofa. That sofa was one of my first purchases on signing the lease, an item long coveted and suddenly ideal for this balcony twenty seven floors up, able to fit either back to the house or along the side wall, looking out at the city.

There’s a long tail indeed now of apartments that have shaped where we put things, places we’ve created snug nooks and added bookshelves. Five apartments now of finding space for a liter box, from the first one that required sealing a section of crawlspace to the most recent, tucked under the edge of a bath tub larger than we’d ever purchase on our own. We’ve hung the same art on multiple continents, and re-arranged the same light panels on a variety of walls, aiming for shapes that reflect a new start, that retain the feel of our old homes. In our first Hong Kong apartment the light panels were spaceship-esque. In the current one they are a crab, copying a children’s book we love. Our inspirations shift, and the materials remain.

Some things we’ve standardized: the foreign currency remains in neat rolls but is no longer hidden in a closet. Instead a small set of Muji drawers holds both money we may never need and the stack of transit cards, bookstore memberships, climbing gym punch cards, and all the rest that remind us of how long we’ve been gathering. We keep a shocking number of business cards for no reason save the difficulty of digitizing them, the difficulty of parting with them. Each stack, of electronic component suppliers in Shenzhen, of packaging suppliers, of film extruders, of business development people and hotel concierges is a window to a world we remember but no longer visit.

In our new space we spend weeks painting and gathering plants, re-shaping the exterior to fit our needs. In the evenings we throw frisbees, ride tiny balance bikes, kick soccer balls, and do yoga on it. In the mornings we read magazines out of doors with our coffee and tea, subscriptions we’ve resumed after a half dozen years of avoiding paper. It’s a good feeling, to go backwards in these ways, and to have an outdoor space. It’s a new home for our small folding sofa, even if a larger set of chairs would fit. Like all apartment-dwellers we repurpose things bought custom for other spaces. The desk that rolls up into a set of drawers is a great part of my new office, two houses on from where it began. The tiny wooden chair, one of the only things we brought across the pacific, is perfectly at home in it’s fifth apartment, more in use than ever before. Much like the cat, who is happier than ever before, actively hunting at almost thirteen.

In Hong Kong the mystery of prior inhabitants is stronger than ever, almost every space re-shaped by some previous resident. Whole rooms and walls have been moved and created for helpers and twins long gone. A walk-in closet replete with aircon built for a banker with a library of suits to protect, and finally an open kitchen created for someone who likes to host, who likes to share breakfast across a counter with some children, as we now do daily. We repurpose some, the closet for a bedroom, the bedrooms for an office, removing doors, adding curtains, painting and spackling until we feel comfortable. Putting down the tatami in multiple rooms I wonder if future inhabitants will be able to smell the dry grass long after it’s gone, long after we have moved on. I wonder where their children will sleep, or whether they’ll tear out this remodel, now more than a decade old, for some set of spaces still unimagined.

I think about the secrets of old apartments I can no longer remember, of all the items that now reside in a Colorado basement, or were given away on leaving San Francisco. I think of our Bunjo chair, rediscovered in the mountains last summer, a joyful piece of furniture I’d long since forgotten.

“My blue worm is in Tokyo,” says our daughter. “And my other blocks”.

For a moment, like all our American friends with houses purchased on thirty year promises, I am happy to have another place, to have a place that will see fewer future residents, where the changes we make will be discovered by friends, will be remembered by our family.

And then I remember to embrace the temporary, to relish the interplay between our ancestors in residences and our as yet unforeseen homes, still occupied by people we will never meet.

Empty windows

As always, things end before we were really ready. Returning from a month abroad, we find our living room faces a newly empty apartment. Across the street the walls are bare, save for a horse painting. It will be left for the next tenant. The curtains that had obscured the kitchen are gone, leaving a clear view of the small space two women shared for the past two years. The apartment looks both larger and smaller, in the way of these things, with all their furniture gone.

We wonder where they’ve moved, these women we never spoke to but shared some slice of life with. For two years we have seen them come home late, the lights often going on at last at eleven pm, work finally over. We’ve watched them host dinners on Friday evenings, welcoming a handful of friends with wine and laughter. Mostly we have seen their cats, and they ours, as the animals watched the world or lay on the dining tables that face each other across the small street that separates our buildings. For two years we have shared the occasional wave and the knowledge that we are not alone, that despite the lack of communication we are happy to see each other, happy to watch the cats grow up.

And now the apartment is empty. For us, returning home after travel and quarantine, the loss is instantaneous and the shock unexpected. Out of all our neighbors, the cluster of shared windows and barely visible lives, they were the two we appreciated most, two women and two cats. We miss them, and wish them good fortune. For ourselves, we wish for neighbors with cats, and we wonder when we’ll see those lights go on again.

Remnants of previous inhabitants

As a child of the countryside I am often surprised by how many mistakes are made in cities. Not mistake of great magnitude but small mistakes of location and history. A year and a half after moving into this apartment we still receive mail intended for a photographer’s studio, a business once housed here long before. Before too the couple who preceded us, who lived in this apartment for three years. I track these mistakes, noting not their number but the variety. Amanda. Jamie, Brad. None of these names are of the couple before us, which is as far back as my knowledge stretches. For any of these to be correctly addressed would have been five years earlier. Some of these are automated mailings and probably date back to the first tech bubble, to the last century. How many of these people still live in this city, this state?

How mobile are we, and how fragile are the records of place we use daily to communicate? Fragile? Or strong in that they persist long after we’ve departed. I think of phantom contacts in my address book, names with but one piece of information, a yahoo.com email or a phone number from China. These pieces of information I know to be wrong, and yet have nothing current to replace them. I do not want to delete these once friends, once business contacts, and so they remain in my phone, reminders of past relationships I have no ability to rekindle. Like the physical mail, these connections are so easily disrupted, an account unchecked or a phone number abandoned upon moving home. Without a forwarding address, without a reporting mechanism, Yahoo will continue to accrue unread emails, and letters for people I do not know will pile at my door. Susan, specifically, will probably continue to receive birthday notices at this address long after she, and we, have moved on.

In April a hand-written Easter card to a new name arrives. I imagine someone’s grandmother addressing it in a small town on a floral vinyl table cloth. There is no return address. The small envelope is a pale yellow with a pink printed ribbon across the front. I ask each of the other three apartments about it in vain. The recipient hasn’t lived here for at least six years, which is as far back as our collective memories of this building stretch. Six years suddenly does not seem so long.

I wonder if we still get mail to our Sunset studio of a year and a half ago. Do personally addressed credit card offers still arrive at our Houston apartment? Long-lost postcards in Shanghai? Bank account statements in Tokyo? Imagining this invisible layer of the world, sadly incomplete and with reasons for ‘return to sender’ unknown, keeps me in a gloomy mood for almost weeks.

Until one morning on her rounds the postwoman takes the Easter card away.

Squirrel tricks

There are two important parts of a home.  Having one, and what’s outside of it.  The saddest part of leaving Tokyo was not the actual leaving, but abandoning that home.  Knowing that the next time I landed in Narita two hours of train would not bring me to my doorstep makes me want to move back even now, five long years gone.  The loss of a home means not being able to welcome people to a foreign country, to an environment they know nothing about.  Finding friends at the train station, mouths agape, and leading them through winding streets to a balcony all our own is a joy that leaves uneasily.

In Shanghai these past years we welcomed guests through from all parts of the globe, travelers and those seeking homes of their own.  Some for weeks, some for scant hours until their flight out or train inwards. Simply having a space, being able to offer shelter and retreat to those far from theirs, rewards each month’s rent.  Feeling comfortable in a foreign place, be it Manhattan or Los Angeles, because someone has a place we can return to, has value without equal.

Yet it is the second aspect that draws me forward, into new cities and out of old comforts.  Sitting now facing down Rice’s manicured lawns, watching the trees sway outstretched in the sun, I am glad again of that pull.  Ensconced again in a city I was not born to the greatest gift is in each morning’s presentation of the world outside: the squirrel highway that runs past my window.  Gifts like these drive my apartment hunting mind.  Interior quality is of course preferred, but the essentials lie in window light, in vantage point, in relative location.

Like with all things, luck is of the greatest assistance.  A friend whose landlord owns another place, a relative who owns a building, a teammate’s relocation, these coincidences cannot be paid for, nor planned.  Still, their results can be evaluated by these same desires; like all homes they compete primarily on what can I walk to, what can I see.  These questions applied to the Saitama apartment of years before give out answers that reinforce my desire to return: an express stop on the Saikyo line and Mt. Fuji.  Those two things, one walkable, one seen, coupled with the ability to grant others a base from which to visit Japan, outweighed all negatives of expense and space.  In Shanghai other calculations won, usually the desire for an easy walk to anywhere overcoming view.  Too often in cities location becomes the dominant demand, the singular benefit of housing.  Too rarely does the view reward.  The squirrel highway does, with its multiple levels and fast-paced travelers.

On the second floor in a residential neighborhood, an apartment-wide swath of windows gives me panoramic views.  They are, for the most part, of trees and houses with limited sky.  I am sure they have not, despite their excellent light, entertained previous residents so much.  The property line, just behind my apartment, is demarcated by a wooden fence, some four meters tall, topped with a flat rail.  Another meter above it and parallel runs the phone line, thick tubed and taunt.  Slightly above that runs the power and cable, a weave of thinner wire and rubber that only the truly harried consider.  The top of the fence sits just above the baseline of my windows, the highest wires just below their top.  When traffic is heavy, lane changes are frequent, with those following the phone cabling often dropping down to the fence before continuing.  This highway supports a robust traffic in acorns, smaller nuts, and random bits of fruit, as well as the occasional high-speed chase.

The squirrel’s gift of full-field vision minimizes accidents, allowing for a more rapid pace than is perhaps strictly recommended at such a height.  The acrobatics involved in switching lanes are of an utterly untrained nature, and vary from the simple jump-and-hope to the more delicate hang-and-reach.  The traffic does not show any particular commuter pattern, lacking the to work and home again flows of human highways nearby.  Instead travelers scamper back and forth at all hours, often left and then right again in such quick succession that little, if anything, can have been accomplished on the tree just out of view at the edge of my property.  Perhaps the individuals are merely attempting to touch all the surfaces in a certain order and at a certain pace.  This would explain the oft-observed bound up onto the fence, sprint along its top, leap for the tree, run up and out a branch, spring for the telephone pole and dash back along the cabling to some invisible destination.

While the easy walk to campus and the convenience of other human habitats is not to be overlooked, it is safe to say that my favorite feature of this new home is the constant goings-on that occur just behind it, elevated perfectly to fit inside my wide bank of windows.  I appreciate the fence builder in a wonderful way.  The power company’s decision seems incredibly coherent, in contrast to so many of the random spools of wire nailed to posts and house corners throughout my neighborhood.  They were building a highway for squirrels, keeping them off the ground in a high-traffic area.

The best moments of this view come at off-peak hours.  While I sat quietly one September afternoon, a squirrel paused on the fence’s top board.  In no hurry he settled down, belly flat upon the wide wood.  And then, just to check, he dangled his legs and arms off of the side, paws swinging slightly in the sunlight.  Eyes watchful he lay there for a minute or more, before hopping up and sprinting off.  After several weeks of squirrel observation I laughed, amused at his peculiar antics, and returned to my work.

A few moments later motion again drew my eye, this time to the telephone line.  He was back, wiser and higher.  A moment later, in the middle of the cable’s span, he flopped down on his belly, legs out and swaying.  He lasted three minutes before another squirrel’s appearance in the tree made him scamper away.  Embarrassed to be caught relaxing in the middle of a work day.  Like myself, in so many ways, always watching this squirrel highway.