A Little Apartment in Ohio

Outside, gray skies. A matte, smooth gray. Gray skies that last far beyond the reach of winter, into the new greening of spring, the wet warmth of summer, breaking only for the woodsmoke-filled breezes of fall. No sunbeams break through the non-existent clouds; the light is diffuse and muted. The rest of the landscape is secondary to the gray skies; the eye is drawn upward and captured by the dullness. The bare black branches of sleeping trees stabbing the skies in winter or fluffy green fingers and tendrils creeping across telephone poles in spring or flashes of lightning and a ground-meets-sky harmony of sheeting rain in summer are merely background noise.

Inside, color. A lemon-peel yellow spread across the walls in the living room, the kind of white that children imagine clouds to be in the kitchen, baby-boy blue in the bedrooms, and violent tangerine in the bathrooms. An old, worn couch, with pillows pounded and shaped by the sleepers of a thousand naps, sits against a wall in the living room, draped in a faded denim-blue slipcover printed with fat white flowers. A mirror in a wide, chunky, square silver frame embossed with the same fat flowers hangs over the couch. Unfinished-oak bookcases everywhere – at least seven fill the apartment. They’re filled with thousands of paperbacks and hardbacks – 3,546 at last count – many missing covers and held together with Scotch, duct, or electrical tape. Scattered across the tops of the bookcases are candles, blue-glass vases filled with many-colored silk flowers, pictures in beaded frames, and more books – dictionaries and an atlas and a series of Time Life books on photography. Pictures on the walls – Dali, Magritte, Matisse, Escher, and two abstracts: one in blues, yellows, whites, and oranges, the other swirls of charcoal black-and-white. A big scratched oak table is set in a nook called the “dining room”, and around it are solid oak chairs with fraying navy-blue cushions. Soft, silent curtains in a warm navy-blue hang at the sliding-glass door, replacing the clacking and clattering of the plastic verticals installed by the apartment managers. A shabby wool rug, in strips of blue, orange, white, and yellow, leads to the front door, to the gray skies.