The Family on the 26th Floor

The Time of Blinds and Guilt

We’re almost four months in to our experience living in a high rise Seattle apartment building. It’s mid-Summer now, and hot, so our view is mostly obscured by our own blinds, which we have to pull down and close against the sun. Heat rises, and without those blinds and our…

Keep Families Together

Yesterday I wrote a blog post here about my concerns regarding our move from our house to this new experience: a rented high-rise apartment. I wrote about my concern regarding our children: whether, when they came home from their colleges, they would feel at home in this new place…

Leavings and Returns

When we moved into our high-rise apartment building, we had two children at home, one on the east coast in college, one on the east coast in graduate school, and one — the oldest — living here in Seattle, working and making her way in the wider world. When we sold and left our house there…

Two Months In

We’ve lived in our apartment long enough now for some of the initial organization to have loosened a bit. Our pantry looks a little less tidy. The stovetop isn’t quite as perfect-shiny. I’ve swept the floors enough now to know which corners the dog hair tends to settle in.

Pets in Apartments

When we moved into our apartment we brought with us our dog, our cat, two fishtanks and one tank containing an apparently immortal hermit crab named Mimi.

Previous to becoming city slickers, our pets lived the life of urban-suburban animals. Our dog had a sizeable…

The Things we Moved

The past month we’ve been engrossed in the reality of living here, in our new apartment. But the process of getting here still hovers around, echoing off our still-beige walls, because the process was a bear. It was a mountain. It was doing taxes and planning a wedding and interviewing for a…

Work Orders & a Desire

Before we moved into our apartment, we were told that the outgoing tenants had scratched the floor, and it was going to be replaced. The scratch was two parallel lines about ten feet long, stretching from the entrance hall, through the dining area and into the living room. We were shown…

Things we Hear through the Walls

It’s been awhile — since graduate school — since I’ve lived in an actual apartment building. And whereas I didn’t forget that I used to be able to hear everything through the walls, I didn’t know exactly what, if anything, we’d hear here, in our Seattle high-rise.

Meeting Neighbors in Elevators

To get to our home now, we take the elevator. That seems so obvious, and banal. After all, we’re not going to be walking up and down twenty six floors every time we come or go. But getting to and from your home from an elevator is a cosmic shift from getting to and from your…