AUDI, AUDI, I'M A COWBOY

So, we're out of our apartment today. As soon as our landlord's lackey can make time for us. In true Cardiff style, we have no exit appointment, just a promise that "Peter" who we've never heard of before, will call us to come by and do a walk-through. It was implied that it would be morning, so we went to bed at 3am and set an alarm for 8am so we could finish cleaning, packing up odds and ends and dropping things by the charity shop. But I have a feeling, as we're finishing up here, that we'll end up sitting here most of the day waiting for him. Argh.

Moving is hard on us. We're sentimental like you wouldn't believe. We've lived here nearly as long as we lived in our apartment before moving, and longer than anywhere we've lived together before that (we lived in four places in 3 years before we bought our condo). And each time we work really hard to make a place feel like home. We get attached to the tiny things that gave us comfort in a strange place. Remember my first or second post on this blog, about living in separate dorm rooms while waiitng for our flat to be ready? I hung up magazine pictures, bought a desk lamp and two small ceramic cups, just to make it not so cold and alienating. Even before that, when we had to spend a night on the bare beds in the clothes we were wearing because our stuff was in storage, we bought two towels and a cotton blanket. Yesterday, we sold the lamp to a co-worker, along with random kitchen things, and we gave the blanket to the local Cancer Research charity shop. But we shipped home the two small cups and we're keeping the towels, and I tucked the magazine cutouts into a book we're taking with us. See, sentimental. And that's just one tiny example.

The thing is, as much as it sometimes seemed like we'd never leave here, and as much as we settled in to daily life and developed new habits, I'm pretty sure that when we set foot in Seattle again, this life will rush away into the distance and be hard to fathom. Like hard to believe we were ever here at all. That makes me sad, because I want to remember all the details and all the relationships, and I want it with clarity, surround sound and smell-o-vision. So we try to give things to people we like, so we can imagine them being used, and we're taking home probably more little things than was quite necessary, and I've walked the city with memorization in mind. But still, scared it will all disappear.

But I guess I don't really have time to ponder and fret--I need to go make the back yard presentable to non-hippies. Who are going to live in MY house and neglect MY garden and never even notice that there are herbs (with a silent "h") planted there.