An upstairs apartment in a Ballard duplex that overlooks the playground behind Adams Elementary School is vacant for the first time in 13 years. The anti-war signs that were between the shades and the inside glass for a decade aren’t there anymore. Across the one-way street the recess bell still rings and the playground will be noisy with grade-schoolers for another week. Then both sides of the street will be silent except for the bounce of a basketball and the crack of a stick against a puck during rollerblade hockey.
The first time I looked up at those windows from the sidewalk it was a misty Wednesday, the night before Thanksgiving in 2004. I had not yet met my future husband in person but we’d exchanged enough information such that old-fashioned white pages revealed that his own mother lived one block from me. It seemed to reveal fate.
My daughter was babysitting so I was able to slip away in the quiet that happens the night before a holiday in which families reposition themselves all across the country. I saw the “War Is Not the Answer” sign in the window and felt further connected. My own mother has always posted her passions on hand-made yard signs and bumper stickers. That was almost eight years ago.
Martin and I met for the first time in person at Market Street Grill, a restaurant that is no more. Last week his mother left her apartment and moved to Ballard Landmark on Leary Way, into a building that didn’t even stand five years ago. After weeks of sorting and packing the three young men from Hansen Brothers quickly removed the small amount of furniture that was “going” to the new one-bedroom. It seemed less like a move than a shuttle for me, another round trip between the old and the new, the 6th or 7th in less than 24 hours.
However for my mother-in-law it was goodbye to her home as she went down the stairs that morning, pot of African Violets in hand. “You’ll be back,” I told her, looking at the cupboards, the file cabinets, the furniture and boxes still to be resolved, while I loaded items for the Senior Center Rummage Sale and prepared to meet up with the movers at the other end. I didn’t get it. She really was saying goodbye to the life she had lived there; on her own, in the honeymoon years with her late husband Bob and then the years alone, after his stroke rendered him unable to return and her health increasingly made the 13 stairs a challenge.
Just as she had sorted and packed with a sense of mourning, her unpacking was bittersweet at times. Constant reminders of chapters that were behind her, the love notes finally removed from the refrigerator and cupboard. But soon the African Violet had a home and instead of an apartment that was already worn on move-in my mother-in-law had a new beginning in a beautiful location, her bedroom view the green roof of Canal Station just across Leary Way.
I was the one who kept cleaning out the still nearby old apartment, peeling off more post-it messages, sorting hangers and carrying what I could to a still rented garage; my bruised thighs a vivid testimonial to improper lifting. When the apartment was stripped bare it revealed long dead spiders, banks of dust along wallboards that had not been exposed in years, ashes in the fireplace. In that empty apartment I was surprised by my own sense of loss.
The apartment was where Martin first introduced me to his mother and her adoring husband Bob. The apartment is where I had my daughter try to climb the lilac bush when no one could reach Bob, only to learn that the police had been able to break down the door and get him to Harborview first. The apartment was where we stopped on a snowy night because it was a bathroom on the way home and saw an injury on Martin’s mother’s face from a fall that we wouldn’t have known about otherwise. It was where she spoke of her wishes for her 80th birthday party after she learned that her lung cancer had returned.
The apartment was also where we all watched from the window on a Snow Day when a granddaughter visiting from California reveled in the snow and where the EMT’s always despaired of the obviousness of the “hidden” key.
It was in the driveway at the base of the stairs that she fell against a car door and suffered a skull fracture on a morning when Martin and I heard sirens and told ourselves we had to stop thinking that every siren had to do with his mother. And then the phone rang. It was to that apartment that his mother returned triumphantly after 60 days; beating the odds like the Energizer Bunny that she is. It was that apartment that she left on her own terms a few months later.
When I literally crawled my way out of my own vacant house a few years ago (drying and shining the wood floor with all that I could still muster for a rag – my own turtleneck sweater) I knew the emptiness was temporary. It was Christmas Eve – a young family was itching to start their own holidays there as soon as possible and Martin and I were moving to our own new home. However this empty duplex apartment is in limbo for now, desperately due for an overhaul, no tenant in its horizon.
As I closed the door on the vacant apartment I said goodbye to my own history there, but I left empty handed.
