We spent yesterday cleaning and painting the old place. I painted Charlotte’s room blue in 2010 using a small paintbrush. That’s all. It took about 12 hours of careful painting. I know it was hard and almost pointlessly slow, but I really wanted it to look nicely for her. Then the wall leaked in three places and a fourth place behind her mirror, which we didn’t find until we moved — complete with fragrant mildew. This, along with the 7-month broken window and 2-month broken window, were large factors in us moving out of a building in which we’d lived for five years (and three units).
Yesterday, I applied 3-4 coats (depending on the spot) of paint to cover it all up. The last stroke at the top of the Northeast wall that covered up the blue made me incredibly sad. My wife was interested in painting the room. I was [and am] bitter and sad and mad that we almost had to move because the building’s increasingly poor management and maintenance; so I almost took her up on it. All that work, and Charlotte won’t even remember those deep blue walls. Painting over it depressed me. But, frankly, I’m a faster painter, and we needed to just get it finished. So I did all the painting.
It’s sad, to me, that we had to abandon the first place that Charlotte ever called home before she would ever remember it. Sweeping our bedroom yesterday, I realized that I was standing where Charlotte’s crib stood until she was 6 months old. The first night away from the hospital and the army of nurses. The first night in her own PJs, having a real bath, in her own crib, in our home. The first place she ever slept at night because it was nighttime or slept through the night (though the latter is really still a rarity; she has a small stomach but a hunger for playing and exploring).
Now it’s not home anymore. There are just a few piles of crap and our bikes there. After Thursday, we have no claim at all on it.
Hell, it’s probably the room where Charlotte was conceived, though, for the sake of family folklore, that — ahem — happened after a Tori Amos concert in Washington.
Who knows if Charlotte will remember our current apartment? It’s much larger, though, and she usually forgoes her toys in favor of running around.
