Death by Apartment

Back in the USA, but not back home because I am going to Minnesota to be fingerprinted for my job and also to apartment-hunt. I grew up in a college town where there are approximately five thousand apartment complexes, so I expected this to be rather simple.

I can hear your guffaws all the way over here.

In my defense, it totally would have been simple, had I only had the foresight to be 65 and therefore allowed to live in a retirement community, but ALAS I was born forty years too late and therefore spent the afternoon beating my head against the internet, and the classifieds, and the walls of various apartment buildings around town, in the steaming hundred degree heat.

To no avail. "I'll live in a box," I said, as we drove out of town. "Behind the school. Or possibly I'll take over an unused janitor's closet and sleep among the mops. Or I'll colonize an abandoned barn and befriend the bats. Or..."

But here my imagination failed me and I lapsed into a morose silence.

"We've missed our exit," my mother announced. "Why don't we stop at Perkins?"

So I had a slice of peanut butter pie and as we were leaving my mom gestured across the street toward the graveyard and said, "Do you want to check out that apartment complex?"

"I draw the line at appropriating a mausoleum."

But it turned out that cradled in among the graves was an actual apartment complex, with clean cream walls and pine trees. "I can take walks in the graveyard at sunset!" I said.

"It will be very peaceful," my mother agreed.

And they have a one bedroom apartment opening up on September 1st. We're meeting tomorrow to hammer out the lease.