Apartment 2024

As predicted, I have not been able to quite handle posting daily. However, I’m still feeling pretty darn good with the general uptick in writing I’ve been doing over here. It’s amazing how once I start being open to the idea of the mostly daily blog post, the ideas for the blog posts begin to flow in my direction.

For instances, I spotted this post today on The Kitchn, in which Emma recalls what her mother used to do with the leftover bits of pie crust that got trimmed from the crust during holiday baking. It took me hurtling back through my own memories of pie baking with my mom. Whenever we had leftover pie crust, she’d divide it between my sister and me, and let us make tiny, jam-filled tarts. We’d bake them in the toaster oven, a bit of jam would always leak out and burn to the pan, making for a delicious, sticky mess.

I know that I always looked forward to those crust scraps, because they made me feel like the little girl in that chapter of Little Men, in which she’s given a toy kitchen and is taught to cook miniature meals (ingredients delivered by the family dog). I have no plans to make a pie this year, but thinking about those days makes me want to mix up a batch of pie crusts, just to make a batch of jammy turnovers.

I woke up yesterday morning with a sore throat and by afternoon, was harboring a case of something cruddy. I stayed home from work today, and while I’ve been desperate for a bit of concentrated time in the apartment, this is not the way I wanted to get it. I had NO energy and so all I could do was stare at all the messy piles and half done projects.

However, by around 2 p.m., I had to do something. So, I did what you see above. Yes, that’s right. I separated out my rubber bands, twist ties and clothespins (I use them to close bags and clip notes together) by color and size into their own jars (I’m not entirely sure how I came to possess so many rubber bands – I think some have to be leftover from my grandparents).

Happily, after a day of laying around, which brief organizational breaks, I’m feeling much better. The cold (at least, that’s what I think it is) seems to be leaving (although my right nostril is a faucet I can’t quite turn off) and I should be back to work tomorrow.

Grades 5 through 9, my family lived in a house in the West Slope neighborhood of Portland (just off Canyon Drive, for those of you keeping track). It was a quite little pocket of suburbia, bordered on all sides by busy streets. Next door to us lived an elderly woman and her son. For the most part, both generations of this small family were grumpily quiet, keeping to themselves unless we actively engaged them in conversation.

I remember one day, my mom had to go over and knock on their door to ask a question. When she returned a little while later, she reeked of mothballs. The chemical smell radiated from her person as if she’d been dipped in a vat of pest killer. It turns out that this neighbor had wool carpets and her method of protecting them was simply to scatter handfuls of toxic mothballs around her home. “Take that, moths!” I imagined her saying.

This woman has been springing to mind for me of late, because this is the time of year when the William Penn House hallways begin to smell of mothballs, as people pull out their winter things and stow away their summer stuff. There are a couple of days at the change of every season when the mothball aroma seeps through the walls and into our apartment. It takes a while to identify as mothball stink, at first I just notice a slightly off scent and start running around the apartment, sniffing and trying to find an abandoned dirty sock or a rotting potato (there’s little that smells worse than a rotting potato).

Then it begins to get stronger and I’m finally able to identify it. I don’t love it, but at least I don’t have to be on guard, wondering what’s crawled into the drain and died.

However, I still don’t understand how people can live with mothballs the way they do around here (I use a combination of lavender and ceder to keep my woolens moth-free). They are so toxic and awful smelling.