First Apartment: Introduction, or A Year's Reflection

When I woke up this morning, it felt like fall.  Last night was the first time in months I had slept under a blanket; lately, I've been wiggling my toes out from under the sheet to cool them off.   But this morning, my nose was cold.  It made me think of the summer mornings I'd spent at my friend's camp on Lake Champlain where we grew up in Vermont.  We always slept in the screened-in porch, and the wind from the lake would freeze us awake in the mornings, making our noses cold and our eyes water.  We would pull our heads back into our sleeping bags and listen to the waves, waiting to see how long the other would pretend to be asleep.

This morning when I woke up to a cold nose, I knew fall was on its way.  There's no lake here to cool off my room, and while I still pull my head back under the covers and pretend to be asleep, summer won't wait for me.  It's already packing up to go home.

As I lay in bed, rubbing my nose, the changing season reminded me it was around this time last year that I moved into this apartment.  I graduated college in May 2006 and stayed with a friend during the summer.  In the fall, my family packed up my room in Vermont and helped me move with my college roommate--now my twenty-something roommate--into my first apartment.

It is not glamorous, not like you picture as a kid, thinking about what life will be like when you're on your own.  Even though my mother affectionately refers to it as "the hovel" (thanks, Mom), it isn't as bad as it could be, either.  Over the past year, there have been many times I've wanted to move out, find a better place, a bigger place, a cleaner place, or just a different place.  I've resented the windowless kitchen, drooping ceiling tiles, paper-thin walls and grubby windows.  But for now, this is home.  And right now, it finally feels like it.  All of its defects are part of the charm of the twenty-something life it holds inside its walls, and as I look around at all the things I would like to change about this place, I know they're they very things that give it character.

This blog is my way of sharing that character with you: all the ups and downs that come with being on my own for the first time, in my first apartment.  Stay tuned for pictures and stories on everything from plants to gunshots, as well as recipes from my very own windowless kitchen. 

Whether adventure or misadventure, it's all part of the charm of growing up.