This Old House

One legacy of my having moved into the little white bungalow on South Nelson Street that first belonged to my then-fiancé is that his clothes already filled the tiny master bedroom closet, and his dresser claimed the only usable wall space, given that the room has a sloping roofline and double windows. Therefore, my dresser went into the little half bedroom next door and to this day I use the tiny closet in that room. I think of it as my dressing room, but it is also a little office with a comfy floral reading chair that swivels and rocks.

These days I have to time my dressing around Brian's video conferences, or risk being caught on one of my own conferences in pajamas. His little "Video Camera in Use" sign on the door at least alerts me to whether or not it's safe to enter, so thank goodness we've had no naked wife mishaps so far. If I'm really on top of things, I move my next day's clothes into the bathroom so I don't have to pay attention to his schedule. On days when I do not have any conferences, I've been known to hang out in my pajamas all morning.

I do love that every single space in our house gets used every day by someone. We expanded back from the original house in 2004 to make room for a family, yet families were raised in this house for decades before it became ours. People must have been either very good sleepers, or exhausted every night from hard physical labor to have managed in one and a half bedrooms, with one bathroom. Though the original roofline bathroom closet was long enough to have accommodated a full grown sleeping person, if it came to that.

My cat, Waldo, and I moved in right before Brian's mother and aunt came to visit for two weeks in the Spring of 1999. They had come to look at venues for a rehearsal dinner near our wedding site for the following October, and to meet me of course. The brilliance of my moving in then, right before their visit, is that the house felt less crowded afterwards to Brian, with just me and my cat, than it had for the entire two weeks of all five of us. So I got to stay. And here I am twenty-one years later, feeling really lucky to have enough space that all four of us can be on different MS Teams conferences at the same time without any interference.