miscellany

There’s a new girl at work. I only see her on Thursdays. She arrives in a frenzy, cheeks flushed from her scooter ride in the cool night air and a hectic rush up the stairs, always just a little late. Her hair is long and loose and red. She’s Irish. A beauty for sure, but she never looks quite put together. One week, she caused a stir in the office, a tantalizing triangle of thong brazenly exposed at the top of her summery low-cut pants. We’re a casual group. We do each other favors -- we brush off a little chalk dust here, tuck in an errant tag there. Pen marks in embarrassing places are an occupational hazard in our field. We tell each other these things. But that night, at such a sight, we all lost our tact, and our tongues. Nobody said a word to her, but needless to say, we found plenty of words to talk about it later. I’m not a prude, but I was embarrassed, for myself, and for her.

In other news, I did some househunting last week. It’s a surprisingly engrossing pastime, one that came to me right out of the blue, one I’ve never actually done before. I looked at exactly one apartment before moving out of my parents’ house so many years ago, and when a bigger one opened up across the hall, I moved into that without looking any further. For graduate school, far away in the frozen tundra, I arranged an apartment over the phone, drove west, and moved into it sight-unseen. I was extremely lucky. My accommodation in Greece was also arranged before my arrival, as was my job. It was a whole prefab life. Now I’m thinking of a remodel, a bigger space, a color scheme, kitchen cabinets, a room the buka can run around in. There aren’t many houses for sale in my neighborhood. Right now there are two contenders, both in the same price range. One is luxuriously appointed, for all intents and purposes new, ready to be moved into. But it’s not ideal, and not only because it represents some other family and some other personality that doesn’t match mine. The other is a fixer-upper, with the potential to be a classic. Such an undertaking takes money and time, neither of which my current circumstances admit in much measure.

Despite that, I’ll be spending Easter in the Outpost, wondering if one or both of those houses will have been sold by the time I come back, wondering why what’s difficult is also what’s desirable.