Moving Day

I woke up this morning (Saturday) with a strange conviction – I was going to change apartments. One of our fellow teachers had to return to the US before the semester began because of some health issues. She’d had a corner apartment on the backside of our building, facing northeast. When she left, I’d considering moving into that apartment. However, I had gotten kind of settled in my own abode and had forgotten about it. How strange it was to wake up this morning knowing that I was going to move that day.

Of course, I had to make arrangements with the building super. He spoke no English. I looked up the words for apartment, quiet and noisy. I told him my apartment was noisy (making appropriate vroom, vroom sounds) and Mary’s was quiet. He quickly got the picture and opened the new apartment for me. A friend helped my move my things – I’m still on the same floor.

What a blessing. My old apartment faced up the hill, toward the east. My view was of a trash-strewn vacant lot and some apartment buildings above it. Since the weather comes from the west, all I got when I opened the door to my mini-balcony was street noise and dust. The living room of the new apartment has three windows – two corner windows and one next to the kitchen nook. A cool breeze blew through the apartment all afternoon. I now look out over rooftops below me and into the hills beyond. Directly below me is a little garden behind a duplex. They have a couple of geese, a few trees and an arbor with some flowers still blooming. This morning there were doves and birds (little brown jobbies) flitting into the trees and dropping down to drink out of the water trough that was there for the geese. It made me think of the biblical phrase about everyone having his own vine and fig tree – right here in urban Gaziantep.