The house I used to live in

I keep staring at the ad, over and over. It’s the apartment I used to live in. I look at it, and I feel happy — because while I had some hard times there, I have so many happy memories of the place.

It’s also the apartment where my ex-husband moved right after our divorce. At the time, I stumbled across the ad while looking for a new place; I recognized the address, but I never thought it would be the same apartment.

When I used to drop off the kids, I’d look around and think, “This is such a cute place. I could really fix this up.” And then I did. I ended up living there for ten years; I wrote a lot of good songs in that living room.

This is the same living room I painted teal after my unemployment benefits ran out. It was my last $25, and I was sobbing over the phone as I described the shade to my friend Charlie. I was crying because I couldn’t rationalize spending the money but it did cheer me up and here I am, all these years later. That $25 wasn’t the end of the world.

When I lived there, it was the first time a doctor told me I had cancer. I’d been coughing up blood a while, and by the time I finally got to an ENT, he told me I most likely had malignant tumors in my sinuses that would kill me in a gruesome way. He even patted my hand and told me to “get your affairs in order.” That was right before Thanksgiving (for some reason, dramatic things always happen to me in the fall), and I didn’t tell anyone. Why ruin everyone’s holiday?

I’d just gotten a small insurance settlement, and decided to buy a comfortable sofa if that’s where I was going to play Camille for the rest of my days. But the delivery people couldn’t get it past the second floor landing, and it sat there upended for days until my neighbor got really pissed. I called my brother-in-law, who was a carpenter, and he, um, sawed off enough of the railing that we could finally angle my new couch around the landing and into the apartment.

By the time I found out all I had were plain old fungus tumors (actually, one sinus had a fungus tumor and the other what the sheepish surgeon described as “a giant petrified booger”), I was already deeply in love with my new sofa. It was covered in a deep blue denim velveteen and it was the best thing I ever slept on.

I do remember why I finally moved. Although I mostly loved living on the third floor (the panorama of passing storms was spectacular), the place looked out over a major street, and for most of ten years, I’d magically transmogrified traffic noise into the roar of ocean waves. Suddenly, one day, that stopped working and the noise started to drive me quietly crazy.

It didn’t help that I lived so close to a firehouse — a firehouse that, even then, insisted on preserving the ear-shattering high-decibel siren, even though all the volunteers had beepers and cell phones.

The other thing is, my bedroom faced an auto body shop and even though they had one of those painting rooms built to contain the toxic fumes, the mechanics couldn’t resist opening the garage doors on a sunny day and letting micro bursts of paint drift upward.

Plus, third floor. And I still had two working knees then! So when I was offered a job some distance away, I took it. Looking back, I wish I hadn’t.

Life is all about accepting that there are no time machines and you can’t go back. I know it. But I’m so, so tempted to try.