genarti inspired me to think about places I've lived. I also find responses to things like this interesting!2011
I live in a 2 bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It's what some people call an "elevator building" - i.e., not a walkup, but no doorman. I live there with my spouse of almost five years now. We do have a friendly Jamaican superintendent who is very good at fixing anything related to plumbing, and not very good at fixing anything else. I suppose plumbing is the most important. One bedroom is devoted to our two desks and laptops and a pull-out couch for sleepover guests, that I sometimes sleep on when I am scared of getting really low blood sugar and David is up late working. We have a tiny tiny balcony that I like to put plants on in the summer but don't use as much as I think I do. My favorite thing about our place is that the bedroom is painted green, my favorite color.
2001
I live in two places this year - the first of which is in a dorm room with a roommate whom I've only just met this year. I actually like her quiet a lot and our living styles co-exist very well. But I am tired of being at school, and I want to be off-campus, with my boyfriend and the people he lives with, so part of the way through, I leave my roommate the place to herself and move off-campus to half a house in Arlington, MA. It's old and the inside is mostly wood paneling and old furnishings. There are occasional spats about cleaning responsibilities and money; I'm the only girl among 7 folks who live there. There are four floors - one bedroom sits alone at the top of the house. I like taking the bus into school, but the relationship is already going rather sour, and that makes the living situation complicated. There's a cat who ends up on Cipro and near the end of the year, one housemate's father with cancer moves in with us. He wants me to give him his shots for a while, which I do, but passive-aggressively bitch about it until housemate takes pity on me and does it for his dad. This was before I learned it's better to be honest about things like that.
1991
I am living at home, with my parents, in a two-bedroom, single bathroom house in Cleveland, with a nice back yard. The house is white and green now, but later on, my mom will get it sided in all-white vinyl. (When I go back to visit, 20 years later, I still am surprised that there's no green). The house is old - very old - and four people with two beds and one bath can be cramped, but it never felt like that at the time. There's a bedroom rotation - my brother and I shared when we were kids, and when we got older, my parents moved downstairs to our unfinished basement and let each of us have a bedroom. I feel guilty about this, so when I go to college, I swap with them. But for now, I have the biggest room in the house with three beautiful windows looking out onto the street, and I do love it. Our house has archways and the best natural lighting I have ever experienced. Mom spends a lot of time in the backyard, digging ponds, planting gardens, helping injured frogs and birds.
1981
I'm a small person, only two years old, and I am living with my parents in the lower half of a duplex in Lakewood, Ohio which we rent from a kind, elderly Vietnamese man named Mr. Yee. I remember the house as being dark, but the neighbors who adjoined our backyard had a dog that I used to love to go out and talk to through the backyard fence. I threw him a birthday party once. This house was close to the grocery store, and I would walk with my dad over the bridge there, and we would stop at Penguin's ice cream on the way. Or to the liquor store, before parties, where Bob the manager always had a pretzel rod for me. I remember we had a washer but not a dryer, and I recall doing a lot of laundry hanging.