Monthly Archive

I’m six months away from being an audiologist, I found myself saying. And then stopped to realize I wasn’t exaggerating. Not even a little bit.

So on the commute that’s at least 10 minutes longer than it should be in the mornings, 20+ in the evenings, thankful that I paid attention in defensive driving skills training, I shake my head at the ever-flagrant disregard for human life displayed by the drivers of southwestern Ohio.

When I step into my building, or into the rooms in my apartment that have pipes in the walls, I wrinkle my nose at the reek of the neighbors’ stale smoke, cigarette and otherwise, and try to ignore the expired fire extinguishers in the hallways.

This unpleasantness will not drive me to road rage, nor to any great heights of tenants’ rights action. I’ve been those places before, and might go again sometime. But not from here. Not in the next half-year.

And it’s not because these infuriants in my daily life don’t bother me, or that I’ve mastered the art of not letting things get to me. It’s because I’m on a mission that doesn’t include trying to make a real life, or a true home, in this place. The mission is to get me to the place where I want to do that.

Oh, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t made myself a homey home for a year. That’s somewhat inevitable, what with the cookbooks, and the yarn, and the lamps, and so on. Even half of my gypsy kitchen makes for a lot of homestyle action.

But it doesn’t hold a candle to the last one, which I must confess still has a hold on my heart. It was beautiful and tranquil, yes, in all the ways this one is neither. But the life I lived there, the way I felt there, was more than marking time, not just a means to an end. Once in a while it gets like that here, but it never lasts. I don’t know that I need it to.