There’s a lot to say about this new place. I’ll hit you with the crux: AWESOME. I get my daily exercise walking four blocks uphill at an 18-percent grade to catch the bus, and by the time I reach the top, I’ve had to remove my coat and am panting like the childhood asthmatic I once was. The best is feeling it all get easier, knowing you’ve bought yourself two extra minutes doing whatever it is you do before you leave the house (options innncluuude: manic tooth-brushing, breakfast, tousling hair [rendered useless once you step out and put up your hood], executing an ill-planned last-minute outfit change). Please know that I’ve spent four minutes trying to integrate the verb form of “incline” into the paragraph BUT I HAVE SPARED US ALL.
I live in the middle of a hill. It’s actually a ridge in name, but I’m from a place of such flat spaces that I don’t know one elevated land mass from another. I can’t remember if what I’m seeing in the distance—and often mistaking for low-lying clouds—are mountains or volcanoes, or volcanoes bearing innocuous names. (Hi @mountrainier.) The word I best remember from 4th grade geography is plateau, partially because of the vowels collected at the end and partially for the comforting image of flatness.
At the top of the hill there is a zoo and a park and a Lutheran church that plays renditions of Dracula on the organ. If my roommate and I get the cat we’ve lazily discussed, I’m forcing the three of us up the hill for a reenactment of the Lion King. IT’S LIKE THAT. SORT OF. The view is good when you can glimpse it between the houses, and I’ve taken to walking in the middle of the road on quiet nights because it affords the best view.
The boulevards and gardens seem more packed with plants, yet the hedges seem more sculptured. I’ve never seen such attended-to shrubbery. There are patches of lavender that fall into the sidewalks, and then there are patches that only fall into my mental public property zone after I pull them toward me and pick off the buds.
What more can I say except about ten thousand other things I’ve been trying to keep track of. (That mental note you post, the one that reads, “DON’T FORGET THIS, WRITE THIS DOWN LATER, RECORD IT FOR ETERNITY IN YOUR STEREOTYPICAL BLACK MOLESKINE [‘the notebook used by Hemingway!’]”: it doesn’t work. You WILL forget. And then you’ll try to feel your way back through the embarrassing chain of thoughts and end up feeling like The Laziest Brain-Owner for considering pizza delivery so much and theories of human consciousness so little.) This alleged crux has spun out into much more, aooops, but now it’s time to go sleep in a room that smells like the Home Depot lumber yard in an apartment on a hill in a city where I see the Big Dipper Every. Single. Time. I look into the night sky.
