At home, sort of

It's been a week since the movers left. It's time to say something, yet I find myself starting and restarting this entry, trying to find the right approach. A problem I rarely have at Mile High Apple, where my entries usually seem to write themselves, even if that does lead to a lot of windy, whiney self-indulgence and overwriting.

Home. It no longer smells like paint or echoes with silence. Now it smells like cardboard from all the boxes (I should be used to that smell by now) and the special caulk that plumbers use (don't ask). Some things are put away, some aren't. I have a renewed appreciation for the essentials. For example, I have managed just fine with two wooden spoons since the pots were found and I could start cooking again (I think that happened Saturday.) One would have been plenty, actually. Why do I have a million wooden spoons, spatulas, and various specialized serving implements? But that is a minor question. There are more important ones hanging fire.

It seemed, for many months, living in the old apartment and looking at apartments, that finding a place we could call our own was both vital and impossible. As if I was waiting for this for life to begin -- no, that's the wrong way to put it. Life was going on, as it usually does. But things had a temporary feeling, a transitory nature. I did not really notice my surroundings, except to maintain a minimal level of hygiene and order; did not worry if I liked the furniture arranaged as it was or the color of the walls. These things were not important the way they had been in the house in North Carolina, where the house seemed an extension of ourselves, or rather, was inextricably fused with ourselves.

This was a distressing feeling; now that it is behind me, at least for a while, I wonder if it was not also truer to the actual nature of things. Transitory: Is there a better description of life? I seem to have written a lot here about the longing for permanence, even as I admit to do so is to chase an illusion.

Maybe I am thinking about this too much. Pluses and minuses, what are they?

In the new apartment, the noise and stench of garbage trucks on the street outside no longer wake us up at 6 a.m. Here, no one next door is half-heartedly learning to play the piano. Nothing in the entire apartment is made of particleboard; it all has a reassuringly solid, heavy prewar feeling. There are windows in every room, even the kitchen; sunlight moves from corner to corner.

We chose the paint colors. Our clothes are no longer covered with lint after washing them in the ancient washing machine and hanging them on the pipes. (I will miss the pipes but not the lint.) Now the laundry is as clean as modern technology can make it, even if I do have to scrounge for quarters and descend to the basement. (But is a nice basement, clean and well-lighted, a positively Hemingwayesque basement.)

The dog has learned to ride the elevator and no longer must climb the stairs. (At first he used to stare in perplexity at the elevator door as it closed, but now he seems to have either solved the mystery, or to have given up.)

I miss the old neighborhood: the mix of yuppies, hipsters and Yeminis, the way Court Street got steadily more Italian as you went south and the stores odder. Brooklyn Heights, by contrast, seems staid, the people more uniformly prosperous and complacent. The quiet old streets are darker at night, the prices of everything higher, though it is astonishing that that is even possible. In this respect, like others, it is closer to Manhattan not only geographically.

But the view of the harbor, Lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge from the Promenade, a short three blocks away, stuns me every time I see it, and now I see it several times a day, in all conditions of light and weather. I think I could never get tired of this view.

We are paying a ton of money. On the other hand, we were paying a ton before and it was all rent, never to be seen again.

E.B. White in "Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street" compares moving houses with a crab growing out of its shell; if I could find the book I would quote it exactly, but it's something about how moving makes you feel kind of fragile and exposed, and that is exactly right. I feel oddly out of place, ill at ease, noticing everything and questioning eveything and somehow seeming not equal to it. Not worthy. Where do I pick up the thread, to start living right?