Happy To Be In My Own Home

When I rented my first apartment in an old neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, I was so happy to have my own sanctuary that I dusted every morning before work. Dusting made me feel that I had set things in order before I walked to the hospital where I had my second job in life as a nursing aide. I did not have any furniture other than a mattress box set on a metal frame that the previous tenant had left behind and a short, raggedy sofa which I had salvaged from trash set out along a street, but my living room had beautiful wainscoting which I diligently dusted. The wooden paneling that lined the lower part of my living room walls was a nice rich mahogany that gleamed under my care.

My bedroom was tiny, nothing to speak of, but my kitchen had been painted a bright duckling yellow and I longed to sit there in the sunlight that streamed in the window over the picnic table and benches that were built into a corner, but off to work I went. Sad, sad things happened in that apartment and I do not want to speak of them.