The Whole Catastrophe

My move from a loved, 1840s, 6ooo sq ft, 16 room inn to a basement apartment in a split level ranch triggered the most excruciating aesthetic shock in an otherwise rather happy story. Instead of a fireplace in every room, original wide floorboards, high ceilings, and sunshine through wavy-glassed original window panes, here the small rooms are dark, stark, and Pergo-floored. The largest room has only one window--looking out to what would be a view of mountain woods, if it weren't under a deck. 

Before moving here three years ago, I got rid of about half my household stuff by giving most of it to family and friends and then filling several dumpsters. The remainder of loved things I crammed into this apartment in as orderly a fashion as I could. I learned to move about by jimmying myself sideways between the furniture. And I wept, adopted atheism, became a nihilist for good measure, read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Saint John of the Cross, and went to bed for three months.

When I got up, it was spring. Thawed waters crashed down through the mountain's gullys, does picked their way through the woods with their fawns behind them, life spread open all its beautiful fans, and my esprit returned. Long a reader of Apartment Therapy, I embraced their 2007 Spring Cure. I read Maxwell's book and plunged into the project like someone hurtling down the Niagra Falls. I worked and strove, and at the end of the cure, I'd gotten rid of yet more furniture (to family, friends), and banished more than half of the books I had culled for the move in the first place.  At AT, the cure formally ended , but I struggled on, and by the end of summer I'd accomplished the hell you see in these photographs:

Note pointless, warped, formica counter, extended on and

 on with nothing beneath it . . . except transient stuff

A corner of what was the sitting room,

because the living room was then the bedroom.

What is this room? There's a bed in it somewhere; a two-burner 

antique iron stove thing; and some piano innards. If that helps.

At this point, my view of life seemed blacker than ever and darkened more with the season's waning light. I wormed my way from room to room, picking up objects, whimpering, and putting them down again.  Tumbleweeds of fur from Wolsey the dog and Olive the cat grew as big as bison cadavers and rolled about audibly.  Dishes piled up in the sink and were quickly webbed over by tendrils of life forms evolving down in the bilge. With every cell of my heart I longed  to go back to the dear old inn that had been my home, and the memories of snow beating on the big old windows while I read before the fire, and of waking and looking out the bedroom window at the Storm King Mountain blue with early mist nearly killed me.  

I couldn't think of what to do until I remembered self-pity.  It is truthfully a too maligned indulgence. I had known for years that this was true, and so I felt no compunction. I plunged, and at once, my will to act vanished. Helplessness came like some sublime narcotic. I floated within the hot ache of it all.  I waited for pity to be applied to me by God.  

After a while, when this didn't happen, I started to feel silly. (I suppose that if I were even more narcissistic than I am, I could have dragged it out longer, but there you are.) I thought of how, in the greater scheme, the fact that my home for now is without a hint of architectural character or grace has less weight than a milkweed seed on the wind. It isn't the self pity itself, but the act of moving out of it, that rinses the mind clean and lets the mind's owner come back into herself.  I now saw the challenges instead of the lacks. I went out and bought lots of paint.

And now it's almost spring. The Spring Cure is starting at apartmenttherapy.com. I'm going to see what happens this time.