My New Little House

I moved into my new little house on Tuesday. It's not actually "new"... But it is little. And I love it already. Megan and I discovered that the bathroom door doesn't stay shut... which is fine, cause maybe we'll get a latch. We're grown up like that... we can get latches if we need to...

But I've never rented a house before--big or small. So the fact that I'm typing this at our breakfast nook table on our "borrowed" wireless internet, while listening to the three sprinklers squirt around outside our kitchen window, is kind of surreal. Not the "I'm going to be on Wheel of Fortune tomorrow" kind of surreal... just... kind of surreal. The real part comes with the simple fact that I'm in a new stage of life again. Paying rent and electric bills, planning dinner parties and grocery shopping for the next couple of weeks (rather than a few hours of late-night-homework-cramming)... going to bed at a normal time of night, when I'm tired, because I have office hours the next day and not a final exam at 8 am... and knowing that I'm here in Redding to reside year round because of these wonderful office hours, but also because of so much more... much much more.

And then it hit me when Meg's mom yelled from the kitchen, "Where do you girls want the toaster!?" that I've never thought about where a good place for the toaster would be... or a good place to put band aids... or where a good place to buy a paper towel rack from is...
I never really considered that I could have a garden if I wanted.

Guess it's the little things that make you feel like you're getting older... It's the little things that change when you're growing up... It's the little things you start thinking about suddenly because your responsibilities are shifting and you are suddenly the one making the decisions about the little things. Not that the decisions about the little things make you more mature necessarily, but they're all accumulating to the bigger changes... Bigger changes that eventually find you in a new house you are responsible for... and where you begin to realize, "I think I know where the toaster should go now..."


...and then you walk outside to get the electric bill from your new little mail box.