LOWER THE MOAT (Part One)

The dreaded day arrived when our clogging neighbor’s back healed, and she returned to her nightly overhead thumping. Our lease was up for renewal, and the landlord had decided to raise our rent beyond what we could afford. Although we dreaded the thought, we knew it was time to pack up and move again.

The apartment situation had gotten worse. The places we looked at were either too expensive or too dreadful to contemplate. Everyday after work, I packed a few boxes of our meager belongings, but had no idea where we were going to live. We had to give a one month vacate notice, and our situation was getting desperate.

One day, W.S. announced, “This is ridiculous. I am going to drive around and find us a place to live. If an old lady can live in a shoe, certainly I can find us someplace.” “I’m not living in footwear,” I shouted as he drove away. Three hours later, my hero returned and announced triumphantly, “I found us a place!”

So began our adventure at the Princess Garden Apartments on Kingdom Drive. The Princess Garden Apartments didn’t start out as apartments. The owner built the 20-unit strip as a motel, but when the neighbors in the residential neighborhood took him to court because of a zoning violation, he transformed the motel into apartments. Fortunately, W.S. arrived the day an end unit became available, and he grabbed it.

Kingdom Drive was a short street that dead-ended at the Princess Garden Apartments. Each apartment had a little walkway that led to the front door. W.S. warned me, “The rooms are kind of small, but it’s cozy,” as we stepped into the apartment. On the left was a living room big enough for two chairs and a coffee table; on the right was a kitchen that contained a very small bar sink, an even smaller stove, and a baby refrigerator. The bathroom had a toilet, a shower and a Lilliputian sink.

“Wait until you see the bedroom and study,” said, W.S. Actually, the bedroom was big enough for a double bed---assuming whomever slept next to the wall didn’t mind crawling over the person sleeping next to the entrance. And, technically, it wasn’t two rooms. It was one small room separated by a louvered wall, so when the light was on in the “study,” it gave the illusion of sleeping in a room with bars---kind of like being in a cozy prison cell. We squeezed a desk, a card table chair, a small television set and a battered Salvation Army sofa into that room.

“It’s stuffy in here,” I said. “Please open the window.” “Can’t, W.S. replied. “What do you mean, by ‘Can’t’” I asked. “They don’t open,” he replied. “But we can open the doors.” Turns out that our former motel-now-apartment had long-lasting, sturdy, inoperative Thermo pane windows, but it did have a front door and a back door. With all that said, it was, however, a cute little place and very quiet. Our neighbors were all graduate students whose main objective was to finish their course work, graduate, and escape.

The landlord never came around, not even to cut the grass, which grew as tall as a field of wheat. Occasionally, he’d send someone around to hack it down with a scythe. W.S. loved to sit amidst the stalks of grass, book in hand, waving at passing cars shouting, “Turista! Turista!”

One day when the scythe man arrived, our neighbor began screaming, “Stop him! Stop him! Don’t let him start chopping the grass. I’ve lost my toddler.”

Esther Blumenfeld (To be continued---)
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld, c. 200