In my last posting (The Apartment Building posted 2/28/12) I feel as if I neglected an introduction to my apartment, only mentioning it as reconfigured space, a disappointed step down from the expected 1000 square feet, a place too small to have folks over, when really my apartment is the jewel of the neighborhood and deserves more.
What makes #309 the crème de le crème, the pièce de résistance, the brass ring is that it has, a virtually private, relatively unobstructed view in three directions. Now, maybe if you are living on a spread in Texas, sitting on your horse or tractor with an obstructed view of California you are scratching your head, but if you live in the city where you can watch t.v. through your neighbor’s window in the next building you are probably drooling with urban envy.
What makes this possible is that the designers extended the apartments on the northeast side of the building so they jut out, providing an added direction with a view. That’s right an additional view and still no passing cups of sugar back and forth to your neighbor. (Although living in a vintage apartment building gives off a vintage feel of how nice that does sound. In fact, it took me back to the apartment building in Sunnyside, New York where we lived when I was born. It had a U shape to it so the sides of the U faced each other in the back and everyone would “hang out the window” and “call across” to each other for one thing or another.) Now, if you’re Donald living on the penthouse floor of Trump Towers, an unobstructed view takes on a completely different meaning, but here in Portland, in my neighborhood, in my building, I can pretty much be anywhere in my apartment and not see or be seen by anyone else and, that to me, makes my apartment the icing on the urban living organic cake.
What sets things apart from other neighborhood locales is, there is a two-story house to the east of our building with a parking lot that fits three to four cars. This gap, space, opening as it travels up to where I live on the third floor, offers distance between me the houses down the street, leaving a view of the eastern sky. Looking south, directly across the street, is Trader Joe’s parking lot (which doesn’t hold more than about 25 cars) so again, up here off the ground my eyes can skip across the sky leaping above buildings beyond. The kitchen, bathroom and bedroom have windows that face north and where there stands a tree so large it looks like it has trees growing out of where you would expect branches. It is home to birds who pick this neighborhood to settle down and raise their children, and with my zoom lens I can see them teetering on the edge of what finally look like branches way up into Jack and the Beanstalk land. I love the view so much I painted the molding around the bathroom window black as a picture frame for what greets the eye out there. From the kitchen there is a similar view but this includes a rooftop with a large brick chimney that adds human charm to nature’s gift. I painted the frame around the kitchen window red to capture the red in the bricks outside so we are all part of the picture.
The sunroom was transformed in February when Amy came to spend a week. Maya had given me a DIY subscription and the first issue showed a room that was stenciled in birch trees and I fell in love with the look. I bought the stencil and while Amy was here she painted all four walls in the sunroom, mind you the walls are giraffe tall and there are angles not seen in geometry books. You had to be there to really appreciate the contorted positions it required from both Amy and the stencil in order to continue the forest all the way up and around the room. Of course that was almost nothing compared to her insistence on hanging out the windows in order to clean the outside. Having had a gene passed down to her from her mother that turns cleaning into an obsession (how nice for us on the receiving end) I held onto the leg that remained in the sunroom telling her that gene or no gene her family would never forgive me for letting her hang out three stories above the ground to clean my windows. Of course, my family would never forgive me either, had she fallen and I held onto that leg and went flying out with her. But she didn’t and I didn’t and the difference those clean windows made were right out of a Windex commercial (except Amy and her mom swear by oven cleaner) and the glass seemed to virtually disappear. While I didn’t put my head through the invisible glass I did run to the window on several occasions thinking I had left the window open (even though I know I didn’t open them) and feared Santina would take herself out for a tightrope walk. But it was just oven clean windows!
I marvel at this apartment of mine, this blank space, this new beginning, this place of endless possibilities at a time in my life when I feel the world is my oyster. I stand in the middle of the living room; arms spread wide, spinning around like Julie Andrew’s in the opening scene of The Sound of Music thinking this is my studio, this is my workspace, this is core, the hub, the center of space devoted to my creative juices that then flow into my forest where I write, in my kitchen where I cook and even in my bathroom that has phenomenal water pressure and brings me to life each morning.
