The last few months have continued the stressful theme, with us moving to an apartment/cottage/small place having concluded that the amount of building that we’re going to get done this year is – well – less than we’d hoped. We’re still hoping to get the septic, well and possibly the foundations and drive / access road in. However, any building of the house is conclusively off until next year.
When we realised that we decided to move, and the last month has been a fairly urgently toned attempt to get our apartment to somewhere comfortable and relaxing. We trekked down to Portland to order our sofa*, and we found a book safe, which is beautiful and turn of the (last) century, and is filling up with our books, and looking delightful.
It’s facing our 1896 piano, which seems appropriate, albeit a little odd in what is clearly most commonly a student/bachelor pad.
Anyhow.
So last weekend we decided to say stuff the world and spend some time looking after ourselves. We had a massage, we used our gift tokens to go and buy tea and spices (we’ve had only salt and pepper since we moved in here), we had lunch at Darby’s, played board games, we watched Ghostbusters (2016)**, we went swimming in a lake, and we went and sat in a park eating icecream, reading the paper and enjoying the view of the inlet. It was pretty much awesome and wonderful and really necessary because Kathryn and I have seen each other only in passing so far this month – and will for the rest of the month because of my working hours.
And at the weekend we got a call to say that our sofa was ready. Up until now we’ve been using camping chairs, which are reasonably comfy but have no snuggling capacity. And then today, thanks to our lovely friends lending us their minivan, I made the run to Portland and back to get it. Sadly I couldn’t drop in on friends down there although traffic was so bad coming into and out-of Portland, I probably could have done without actually impacting the journey back substantially.
We even managed, after some trepidation and somewhat inept failure, to get the sofa into our house (it just fits through the door). And now we’re sat on a delightful modern take on mid-century and it’s suuuuper comfortable.
And y’know what? It’s starting to feel more like home.
I still have internal conflict about leaving the UK, or leaving the UK for the US (and not somewhere more liberal and lefty – and that would be more challenging for us both linguistically and culturally – like, say, Iceland****), especially as the debate continues to rage around Trump (you won’t be able to unsee that link) and I worry that the US will follow the UK’s deathspiral into rightwing insanity. But, at this point, I’m sat on the sofa, with a cup of one of my favourite teas, and I’m with the person I love, and y’know what, it feels pretty good to be in this moment.
* 4 to 6 weeks for delivery… being as it was handmade in Oregon – just a block or two from the store in which we saw one design and said “we like that, but we prefer the fabric on that one”….
** Which was awesome.***
*** I’m really disappointed to find that Kate McKinnon seems to have some significant transmisogyny in her recent past, because I was busy adoring her and her character.
**** Which I’ve never been to but is, I’m given to understand, very pretty
