The Po Show

Impermanence

twobuyfour asked about the background in my pic (thanks for all the sweet comments on my hair, everyone!! Heart you all!!). It's my dining room wall, which is covered with artwork that my kids have produced in the last 3 years. The flowers are gladiolus that Ross brought home last Friday (it wasn't our anniversary and he wasn't in trouble or anything! :D We always speculate about the guys coming home on the train with flowers from Dahlia in Grand Central, whether it's their anniversary or they're in trouble with the wife). Tessa has been bugging him to bring home some "tall flowers" to go into the tall vase the kids gave me for my 40th birthday.

Anyway, about the wall. It's covered with my kids' artwork because we never hung up any of our pictures on the walls when we moved here. I put four framed 8x10s of the kids on the mantle, but all the other pictures have stayed boxed up. We have some lovely things too, including the gorgeous calligraphy piece that one of Ross' students made for him when we lived in Japan. There are all of the framed pictures of us when we were young, our wedding pictures, some beautiful prints. All still packed away.

You see, this place was supposed to be temporary. We were desperate to find a place, and this house miraculously showed up on craigslist while we were still living in MA. Ross had to come here to hammer out some stuff for work, so he took the place without me ever laying eyes on it. He said it was okay, but ugly, and the owner's son lived upstairs and there was a basement apartment. Ewww, I thought, not too keen on having people living above and below us.

But it was going to be temporary. There would be no problem getting out of the lease when we found something better.

Only we never found anything better. And trust me, I've looked. There just aren't houses for rent here for less than $3000 a month (we pay $1950, which everyone dubs a "steal" when I tell them how much it is). There just aren't many houses for rent that are walking distance to the train station, which is a necessity since we only have one car.

Plus we really thought that we would be moving at some point. Of course the hope was that we'd move back to CA. Three years ago, Ross was also still sort of looking at the academic market. One way or another, we wouldn't be staying here.

But three and half years later, we're still here, in this ugly, inconvenient house with one bathroom and a crappy heating system that costs us $800 a month to heat in the winter. I think it wouldn't bother me so much if I hadn't come into this place thinking it was going to be temporary. I would have resigned myself to less than ideal conditions. But I was always waiting to move, for things to change, and they haven't.

I really hate change, despise not knowing what is going to happen. So having the advent of change prolonged for so long has been really difficult.