Right now I’m fixated on the back porch, the balcony—the
feature of my apartment that doesn’t really exist. (In the background I’m also
shopping for a new rug in the bedroom, obsessing over lighting and decor
options for my drab taupe box of a windowless office, and wondering what color
scheme would please me for pillows in the living room…and that’s just for
spaces that are mine.)
Spring is here in Michigan, and so, like everyone else, I
want to be outside. I want to own my desires and bring them to life, I want to
bike through the fresh air and nap in the sunshine and read on the porch.
Before we moved to this apartment, our small but sufficient
one-bedroom, I was already thinking about the fire escape. I knew a previous
tenant had grown herbs on this fire escape, and I have fond memories of the
fire escape to the apartment I shared with Emma, which was big enough for a
table and chairs, three stories up in the trees. I thought of all the New York
City stories that include ducking through the window to catch some air on the
steps; hanging a string of lights and claiming a small patch of the sky for
oneself. Sure, we have a bathroom with a tub in it, a bedroom separate from the
living room, two closets, and a kitchen. We have space for our bikes in the
hallway, and windows in three directions. It’s enough, but it also isn’t
enough.
I imagined us, having just moved in together, mixing drinks
and carrying them through the apartment, one of us locking the cats in the
bathroom so they couldn’t escape, and then opening the door at the back of the
bedroom and stepping out into the early evening to sit on the steps and savor the
last of summer together.
* * *
It’s a good vision. Alas that our first September in the
apartment came with a wasp infestation, centered on that back wall of the
bedroom. I was checking out the fire escape, in the early days after moving in,
and when I turned to go inside, I put the full weight of my leg down onto a
wasp with my bare foot. That was the last time I went out that door until the
following spring—and that wasn’t even the worst of it. After our maintenance
guy and then an exterminator had sprayed three or four times, we started to
find poisoned wasps languishing, first on our bedroom windowsill, and then all
over the bedroom floor. Two, four, six, thirty, until, the final day, Cooper
came home to somewhere around seventy-eight dead and dying wasps writhing on
the carpet at the back of the room and under the dresser we had under the
window, while a sadistic cat looked on. After that, we covered the cold air
return in the room, and the rest of the wasps died and were no more.
That horror stunted my fire escape dreams, and although I
swept the little landing at the top of the crooked wooden steps a couple times,
nothing came of it. Until now! This year, I ‘m ready. I’ve got some copper-wire
fairy lights I bought at Christmastitme but don’t really like indoors. I bought
Cooper a curly parsley plant this weekend—supposedly it’s one herb that can
actually do well inside, so hopefully he can permanently give up buying bunches
of parsley that are always too big to use up in time. Soon we’ll add some other
plants to enjoy for the summer, although they won’t want to winter with us
(basil, thyme, some flowers). We can bring out a stool or two folding chairs,
and sit on our miniature deck and look at the leaves in the trees, and into our
neighbors’ windows.
It’s not an obvious space for enjoyment. It’s about three feet by ten or twelve feet (nothing like the beautiful
66 square foot original patio of
that great blog). You could fit four folding chairs on it, awkwardly in a row,
or you can fit two next to each other and have a nice time together. You could
probably fit a very small bistro table, or one of those half-moon little
balcony tables, and then two simple chairs. We won’t. Maybe one stool with a
plant on it, a plant that can move to the ground if we want the stool. Folding
chairs in the bedroom, just inside the door, if we don’t want to sit on the
steps.
The structure is made of wood, nailed together well enough
to work, but with no thought to craftsmanship. It was painted a bland
bluish-grey a few times, and the paint is forever peeling off, every time you
sweep the leaves and branches off the porch. Straight ahead from the bedroom,
you see three wooden bars, and between the bars (if you’re seated low) or above
them (if you’re standing), you can see a bedroom through a neighbor’s window,
the curtain for which she never fully closes. She could certainly see us if she
looked out. To the right, south, there’s the brightest sun and a nice apartment
building across the street. To the left, north, another building. There’s also
a door to the other upstairs apartment, making this space less private, a
little less welcoming to a takeover. Oh well.
I’m not sure how nice we can make it. It doesn’t really
matter—there are so many parks nearby,
bike paths and the river and picnic tables. There are patios and decks and beer
gardens downtown, a short walk away. After almost two years in this space, though,
it’s a fun challenge to try to add another room, another dimension, to our
lives here. An easy little escape—all I have to do is open that door that is
usually just a window.
So I’ll see if I can grow any plants to block the house next door. I’ll see if the herbs will do okay back there, at the southern end of the little platform. Maybe with a little outdoor rug, and the fairy lights, it will become a porch instead of a crumbling afterthought.
