You Never Forget Your First Time

Joan at Seven Inches of Sense is reminiscing about first apartments.

My first apartment was in grad school. Previous to that I'd lived off my parents' dime in the dorms. This place was on my dime and overall it was a nice place. 2 good sized bedrooms, 2 full baths, and a fireplace. It was on the first floor with two doors to the outside word that were ours and ours alone. I lived with Kristen, a friend from college. She was seeing someone, I was seeing someone, nothing happened. But being coed apartment-mates was interesting nonetheless.

We had the too long hike to the trash can, but the trash was next to the mailboxes. So it worked out. We had the thin walls that let us hear the bed squeaks of the apartment above us. We had the golden kitchen appliances. We had a couple of them catch on fire at various times.

We also had bugs. Crickets. Lots of them. We complained, the complex sprayed, they were back shortly. I sprayed, they were back shortly. The only cure was cold weather. Finally I got sick of it and caulked all the cracks in the foundation I could find. That pretty much killed our bug problem.

There is also something no-one over there had mentioned. Kids. My complex was a "family friendly" complex. Except that it was built in the turn of the 90s and they had packed as many apartments on the land as they could. So there was no room for said children to actually play. Just the playground, which was not even large enough for a game of touch football.

So we had a lot of teens and tweens and tots hanging around, sometimes late at night, looking for trouble to get into. We referred to them as ghetto children. I was never so scared as going home to my apartment late at night after a party or working in the lab. Not because I feared for my safety, but because I knew there would be some dumbass group of kids walking down the only driveway into the complex, dressed all in black, waiting for my nice white car to hit them before I realized they were there. Or even better jumping their skateboard on the speedbump outside my apartment at 1am.