Life in someone else's house

I love our quirky, old, 3rd-floor attic apartment, but there's something just a little bit weird about living in a furnished apartment.  It's kind of like living semi-permanently at your cabin or cottage or the condo you rent for a week in Florida with beachy decor that you would never choose for your own home, or a run-down pension in Budapest or any other place that might become a resting place of old mugs and dishes and furniture.  It kind of echoes with the ghosts of tenants past, who we only get to know through the toy car and frisbee in a drawer, the leftover dill, nutmeg, and coffee of unknown age in the cupboard, or the half-empty bottles of cleaning supplies in the bathroom.  The somewhat random supplies are puzzling:  8 pots and pans, but nothing to bake in; ashtrays but no smoke detectors (?!?); a set of china but no cereal bowls; 20 forks but only 4 spoons; 15 sets of duvet covers but only 2 fitted sheets (which, by the way, are bright orange).

We drink our morning coffee out of Brigitte's long-lost mug,

 our living room is illuminated by a diabolical pair of copulating tropical birds,

and we sit on our rose-patterned sofa and drink out of a Parliament vodka glass (what is Parliament Vodka, and why do I have 4 matching glasses from it?).

Oddly, I feel the need to explain and excuse and apologize for it all when we have visitors.  This is ridiculous . . . they all know why we are here, that these are our temporary digs and we had no role in choosing furnishings and that it's not our fault that the dining room table is at risk for collapsing so please don't lean too heavily . . . but it's hard not to feel some sense of ownership of the place we call home.  Even if it's not ours.

Despite all these idiosyncrasies, this goofy little apartment has become our home in the past couple of months. Life has filled in the cracks and smoothed over the rough spots to the point that we don't notice them as much anymore. The kitchen door that drove me crazy is now just a minor obstacle.  Most of the time we know exactly how to duck to avoid banging our heads on the slanted ceilings in the kitchen (the majority of our minor concussions now happen in the pre-coffee moments of the morning), and Elsa has mastered the 2 flights of spiral stairs.  We've learned that padding our 30-year-old mattresses with 50-year-old blankets diminishes the sensation of springs poking into our backs.  And we have learned that from our perch on the third floor, high above the street, we have a great vantage point to watch the buses come and go, and at 5:01 every evening, Elsa watches for the #1 bus and shouts, "I see Daddy!" as he makes his way across the street, to our funny little home.