The Topic of Conversation in New York is Always Real Estate (Even Mere Hours Before the Apocalypse)

During a meeting at work last week, one of my colleagues was laughing about the fact that the whole apartment she shares with her husband and two daughters was about the size of the room we were sitting in.  We were gathered around a large table, and the only other piece of furniture there was even room for was the buffet table from which we had all just helped ourselves to lunch.

I think about this a lot -- too much -- the fact of how strange it seemed that I, who had loved the sunny studio apartment where I'd lived years ago, would be living in such a big house now:  just me and my three cats.

The place had certainly had its time, years ago, of being filled to capacity.  There had been a time when Steven and I had shared the ramshackle ground floor  with three cats, three newborn kittens, and a fairly large dog.  That sounds like Noah's Ark to me, but I'm sure that people think a thirty-something divorcee, living with only three cats, currentlyy using but a third of the house's living space (in real-estate-scarce New York City) sounds much crazier.  (My protests that not only the pets but the handyman special real estate itself had all been his idea always fall on deaf ears). 

At that same time period, an old friend was living in the top floor two-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend.  The middle floor between us -- the parlor floor, where the cats and I are now living, this being the most recently rehabilitated area of the hundred-year-old house -- was occupied at that same time by another friend and his roommate.  This was also back when the basement (and even the parlor floor hallway) were packed with building materials, including piles of drywall and salvaged wooden doors Steven had dragged in along with the cats and the dog.

Summer is almost here, and I have more time on my hands to relax, but there's been more to what I've been feeling this spring.  I was having trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was -- and that's when I realize that the last tenant, this time last year, had still been yet to leave.  And so there had been this nagging presence, this burden literally on top of me, upstairs. 

I am of course never entirely free -- still a captive of my own obsessive mind.  I have been wasting this newly liberated time on idiotic things like cruising the internet for items I've needed for a while but am only now getting a chance to think about buying. 

All is not lost, however; a lot of this involves MacGyver-like problem-solving.  (Does Home Depot sell some kind of tape I could wrap around this rusted water pipe that threatens to crumble apart and flooding my basement? Is there some kind of tall, inexpensive, sturdy, weather-resistant shelving I could hang outside my window upstairs so that my spoiled cats could let themselves out through an open window instead of harrassing me constantly? Is there a relatively bug-resistant, inexpensive metal cot I could put my encased old futon cushion on downstairs, so that I could still use the ground floor as a late-summer heatbomb shelter --  those nights when the 5-degree temperature difference down there will keep me from losing my mind? Should I just break down and buy an air conditioner finally -- my lack of which being yet another blasphemous oddity in the City That Never Sleeps Without Air Conditioning? If so, what kind could I buy/where could I put it, to ease my fear that air vents leading from my bedroom to the pile of infested mattresses across the street won't make my home seem to be giving off some kind of entomological version of McDonald's No. 5?)

One might argue that it's ridiculous to be thinking about spending money the day the world is slated to end -- but really, what good will having any money left be if I'm no longer around to pay my bills?

But not so fast; I'm thinking that the people spreading that version of "wars and rumors of wars" actually have it all wrong:  only the people getting raptured will be off the hook; the rest of us will be left here holding the bag -- didn't I read that somewhere? 

I say "us" because I'm pretty sure that the fact that I'm slowly reading the Kaballah book, God is a Verb (I just got to the part about "practicing joy," which includes things like taking a bubble bath and sitting outside and looking at flowers and otherwise making sure to have "me" time, and apparently I've been a natural at this for years; I'm not so sure what that says about me exactly) does not entitle me to a one-way Rapture ticket. 

I think I may remember, though, something in Revelations (or something) about how "riches" will do a person no good when the End Times arrive. 

Even if it's not written down anywhere, it's kind of a big ol' "Well, DUH," as far as I'm concerned.  Which is fine by me, because personally, you'll obviously find me with plastic wrap around my head, doing a deep conditioning treatment that finally uses some of that light mayo that hasn't gone bad in my fridge for the past three years, drinking a cup of tea with whatever honey I didn't mix in with it, and writing haiku in my back yard; in other words, I will be fully armed. 

Each day as I walk through the crappy downstairs floor that I no longer use, past the rustic old furniture I've left there (from under which I have finally had the chance to at least clean up the dustbunnies) -- and then through the leaky old kitchen extension that leads into the back yard --  I am struck with this previously unnoticed, not unpleasant, wet, mineral-rich scent that takes me back to the dilapidated two-hundred-year-old house in the country where my ex-husband's mother lives.  And I am enraptured with this notion of having my very own, very musty, very old country home, right here in Brooklyn, just downstairs -- my shelter from the elements.


 

Flowers

The day we'd first come to look at the house, it was April.  The magnolia trees were in full bloom out in the back yards, making Bed-Stuy seem, from the view of this old, run-down house, like some kind of paradise.

What is missing from that account, of course, is that it was just warm enough outside that we wouldn't have noticed that the house's poorly built extension -- the ground floor kitchen -- would later get so cold in the winters that the pipes could freeze even when the heat was on.  Had it been raining, we would have also seen that there might have been a puddle on the floor in that room. 

We would find all of that out later.

Missing from the story, as well, was the seemingly ominous fact that Steven and I had arrived separately to view the place.

Missing from that story is the fact that our schedules did not permit a simultaneous visit.  (Was that an omen too, though, or was it merely a fact of contemporary life?)

Missing from the story was the fact that we would buy the house together but start living apart just four short years later.

But none of this is what I'd wanted to say -- isn't true to the spirit of what I'm feeling -- that even on this chilly, rainy day in May, as I sit, staring out the window of the parlor floor I'd always hoped to live in (instead of renting out to strangers for my survival), I am looking out over the canopy of a flowering tree whose petals and branches are deliciously slick with rain water.

I am a poet who does not know the names of flowers.  I cannot define, with any specificity, what a crocus is.  I can tell you exactly what layaway means -- and tenement and stoop and flashing and grout and joint compound and pigeon -- but not finch or foxglove.  Not really anyway.

But I can also tell you that in Spanish, the word for pigeon is the same word that's used for dove. And I can tell you that Paloma is also the name of Picasso's daughter.

But Google will not tell me the name of the beautiful tree outside this window that is currently making my day.  No, the magnolia trees magnificently came and went in April; this is a different tree, a different flower -- a pink less pale and surrounded by an abundance of clusters of these small oval leaves that are slightly pointed at the end. After searching the web for an hour, I can tell you that what is missing from the internet is the identity of this flower with its darker fuzzy underside, its symmetry like a small set of lungs, from between which sprouts a small bulbous bulge reminiscent of some object of a study by  Georgia O'Keefe.

No, I can say that whatever tree this is that blooms every spring -- in sync with the bush of tiny, white clusters of lace-like snowmound spirea flowers below it (thank you, Google) -- is not a magnolia tree.  These newer pink flowers come to my rescue each spring, blooming just as the pink and red and orange and yellow tulips that Steven had planted (his pragmatic way of giving me flowers, he had told me) are beginning to close up and fade and die.

I can tell you that it is supposed to rain every day this week.  But I can also tell you that in April the muddy, winter-ravaged back yards of Bed-Stuy bloom into clouds of pale pink magnolias, and the tulips below me open in orange and yellow and red flames, which die out to be replaced by these darker, unnamable pink blooms and snowy white ones.  I can say that soon will come, accompanying an unbearable sun, the bloom of hydrangea -- first green, then white, then purple, then blue -- beneath where the tiny white clusters will have since died, along with the vines of purple morning glories that reach across the yard every relentless New York summer.  I can say that the brown leaves will then fall, followed by the snow.

And I can tell you that all of this will be both preceded and followed by this green glow of rain.

The Judgment of Solomon

Nice:


http://divorce-clementlaw.mt4temp.lexblognetwork.com/equitable-distribution/divorcing-couples-house-divided-by-wall/

Fresco of the Judgment of Solomon (stolen from Wikipedia)