We Sold the House to Move Into an Apartment

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I wrote most of this in 2016, a few weeks after we moved in. I’ve left it in the present tense.

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In college, Cecil and I could not wait to get out of an apartment.

That was the whole plan. You rent for a while, you save, you buy a house. That’s the direction it’s supposed to go. Ten years later we sold the house and moved into a flat.

 

We were going to be in Germany for three years, so we rented — three bedrooms, near downtown, in a building put up in the 1890s. I loved it before I’d unpacked a box.

The floors are the original hardwood everywhere but the living room. The doors are the original wood. There are pocket doors on both sides of the living room, enormous ones, and ceilings so high I couldn’t have reached them on a ladder — with decorative plaster molding running around the top of every room, put there by somebody’s hands more than a century before I was born.

Our windows are the ones on the second floor.

 

But the thing I keep telling people about isn’t the apartment. It’s the four blocks around it.

Everything is walkable. Restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, bars, a hair salon. The grocery store is two blocks away, and beside it a little market with fresh local vegetables every single day.

Around the corner there’s a small wine shop owned by a German man with a degree in viticulture and oenology — actual winemaking — and I’d like to state for the record that we have become close friends.

One block over is a bakery with fresh bread and coffee every morning.

Across the street is a park, and around lunchtime I can hear children playing in it.

Downtown and the train station are a fifteen-minute walk. Cecil’s work is a fifteen-minute drive.

And five minutes from our door there’s a Protestant church, built in 1892 — the Ringkirche.

In the mornings and the evenings I can hear the bells. Clearly, through the window. The sound brings me joy, and it reminds me of my hometown church in Mexico. I haven’t entirely worked out why yet.

Right now we’re still living out of boxes and the place is a disaster. I’ll show you the rooms properly once there’s anything in them worth looking at. But we’re one step closer to a routine, which settles something in me, and the light comes in off the street in the afternoons.

For three years, this is home.

Con cariño, Abril

 

plan it

 

plan it

 

plan it