The Place

Hopefully this reading will be worth the while of anyone who bothers to test it.

I am now happily settled into a transitory state. I told many folks that I was going to be moving temporarily into an apartment on the cape until I could get a satisfactory residence within walking distance of a Boston train station. When I first heard of the apartment I was given very little detail except that someone at the school had arranged for it and that the proposed rent was 250/month. This would be rather excellent considering the location. It would also prove incredibly convenient for me in that I would have the opportunity to more fully investigate Boston and have time to pick out the most perfect apartment. That things should not be so rosy should have occurred to me much sooner than it did because the trail of breadcrumbs had been laid out. However, my bleeding optimism and offerings of benficent doubt eventually caught up with me. The morning I arrived for work a couple of weeks ago, one of my bosses asked about my housing plans. I told him that I didn't know for certain all the details except those things that I've told everyone. He concurred that he was of similar information but that the expected rent was in the range of 250-300. I also got some information that indicated cooking was going to be constrained. Later that day I found out the name of the person who'd made the arrangements and in another discussion was told something about a barn. This notion of barn had me a bit confused but I figured it could have been a kind of joke, a rennovation, something other than me sleeping in a hay loft.

Because I had to go out to the island that morning I didn't hear more of it for a couple of days. Wednesday one of the students was graduating and a group of staff came out to the island. The party included the gentleman who'd arranged for the apartment at which time I learned that it was in fact a barn with some modifications. A well insulated bedroom and bathroom had been put in the second floor. Certain windows were not to be opened during the winter because heating issues and potential for freezing pipes and several other things I couldn't commit the details of to memory. The presence of a smart but disabled old lady was clarified and confusingly she was consistently referred to as "my land-lady." That is to say that Mr. So-and-so spoke of her as his land-lady, not as mine. He also mentioned that there was some linen available for me to use in the house. He would turn on the water heater and turn off the dish network and remove the TV for me. All of these things were clues to what I would find but, I missed and ignored their signifigance.

The blessed day arrived. Friday came, I made it back to shore, and my boss was to show me the road to this barn turned apartment. We met the old lady at her house which was next door. Turns out it was a barn of her family's and she's been selling off little bits of a huge lot over the years around there other out buildings being converted into homes over the course of it. She explained that the place was clean but she'd been up there to find a bit of clutter around. On this comment I imagined bare rooms with a few odds and ends left behind in corners or on shelves, something akin to what I've left behind when I've moved out of apartments in the past. The old lady gave me the key. The barn was locked up by a padlock. The three of us openend it and climbed the stairs. What we found there defied all of my expectations. The first room of the second floor was filled with boxes of random bits of a man's past. There was a long pipe along one wall covered in hanging clothes. The floor was covered with bits of hay tracked in from downstairs. The dresser was covered with material on top and the drawers beneath were still half-full of clothes.

I was surprised by this but not too. I had been given the impression that the spaces outside of the bedroom and bathroom were not particularly organized or otherwise taken care of and considered how much work it would take to fix things up a bit as we looked in the bedroom. Someone surely still lived there. The bed looked as if it had recently been slept in. There were bits of paperwork, pocket knives, deodorant sticks, coins, business cards, a million different things that a person needs from day to day. The TV was still there and my boss noticed what she thought was a belt sander. Convenient, if I was looking forward to doing any kind of wood sanding...? We crossed over to the bathroom and found a similar sight. Everything had been newly constructed and seemed to be in working order, in fact as if it had been used within the last twenty-four hours. The vanity was covered with toothpastes, shaving cream cans, after shave lotions, facial moisturizers, and yet more sticks of deodorant. I was stunned.

My boss may have been even more stunned. She apologized profusely protesting that she too had been misled regarding the conditions to be found. She left, and for me the moment of true agitation had not yet come. I climbed back up the stairs and went into the bedroom to get my bearings on how exactly I was going to move in and what I was going to do with my stuff. It was then that I took a close look at the bed and discovered rodent feces. Rodent feces on a bed that looked like it had been slept in the night before. A bit apalled, I looked around at the floor to discover more signs of the passage of mice.

Before I came out here I had determined that I might live in this place as much as 6 months. That would allow me to get my bearings and spend the time to find an absolutely perfect place in Boston. Now, I thought a month sounded like plenty of time and wondered why it shouldn't be within a week. I won't detail all of my responses to this situation but, let me say I continue to find interesting and fun surprises. The belt sander turned out to be some kind of massage device. I found a passport, a fridge full of fungus and something that looks like vomit, bits of hay covering bathroom and bedroom floors, etc, etc. I hope I don't have to be here too long.