My New Nest for the Coming Year

I've settled on my apartment for my year away at the Prindle Institute of Ethics at DePauw University next year. So I'm one step closer to this exciting new chapter in my life.

The University generously offered to make available to me one of the apartments that they own and manage, and I took a look at it when I was at DePauw in April. It was perfectly nice, and yet - it was so big, and so bleak and bare. It was furnished with bed, couch, table, chairs, dresser, bookcase, but the bookcase was empty as were the walls. I realized with a sinking heart that I would have to drag a whole lot of stuff with me to Indiana to fill up those bookcases and cover those walls. It was going to be a lot of work to have to generate this whole new life for myself.

I have a constitutional aversion to dragging stuff with me. I've gone to France, and to Austria, and to Taiwan, for two weeks with nothing but a carryon suitcase so small and light that it doesn't even have wheels on it, and I carry it easily from terminal to terminal in the airport. I was never that mom with the huge overstuffed diaper bag. Of course, this means that I was the mom who borrowed shamelessly from the moms with the huge overstuffed diaper bags. I still have the pair of green socks Lisa gave me on our Taiwan trip, when I didn't even have a pair of socks in my scanty luggage. So I admit that I travel so lightly through life partly by being a parasite on my more heavily laden friends. But I'm a cheerful and appreciative parasite.

So the place I've found in DePauw sounds just right. It's small and cozy. It is filled with someone else's stuff - in particular, the bookcases are crammed full of someone else's books. I love poking through other people's books! I'll bring some of my own, of course, to fill the empty shelves in the gorgeous office I'm to have over at the Prindle Institute, but in my little tiny house, I can look at the spines of someone else's books and gaze at someone else's pictures on the walls. I can effortlessly inhabit someone else's space, which I'm so good at doing.

I'm all set now!