Our Second Apartment

I’ve been thinking about our second apartment, you know, the one in my hometown. Maybe it’s because I wrote the “Garbage Strike” story and maybe it’s because my bloggy friend, Katie, just had her baby girl. Bossy was born when we lived in that apartment. We also had our first camera there, so there are lots of pics of it. That makes it much easier to remember.

In 1984 there weren’t many apartment choices in small-town Utah. Even though it is a college town, it is still a small town. They have dorms for students, but married housing was hard to come by. We felt very fortunate to have a “connection” that got us a 3-bedroom apartment at a reasonable rate. It was a pretty nice place, although storage was limited (even with three bedrooms) and it didn’t have a bathtub, just a small shower. The washer hookups were right in the middle of the hallway and on carpet! I stressed about leaking every time I turned on our old washing machine. Dryer hookups were non-existent, but we didn’t have a dryer anyway, so it didn’t matter. We just hung everything up in the spare bedroom on drying racks and planned a couple of days in advance. When Bossy was born, my mom suggested cloth diapers. (She thought everyone should use cloth diapers.) Can you just imagine hanging them all over?

I had to bathe Bossy in the bathroom sink! The bathroom was also carpeted, so we had to be careful about splashing.  We had a basement apartment, so we had about ten steps to get to ground level. Rain is not a huge problem there except that if you remember right, I said the year was 1984. Remember the big floods in Utah that and the previous year? More than once our carpet near the front door was soaked by rainwater that backed up in the tiny drain.

Picture Credit

I remember one night that the rain was just pouring down. We were hunkered down with the baby, doing homework and waiting for it to pass. Suddenly, someone pounded on the door! And I mean pounded! My sweetie jumped up and bounded across the wet carpet in his bare feet. He wrenched open the door just as my mom burst through it and slammed the door. She was slightly hysterical and she was clutching something that smelled divine. “What’s wrong?” I managed before she collapsed onto the couch. “Frogs!” she panted, “You have hundreds of frogs!” My sweetie pulled the front door open again. Sure enough there were frogs! Not hundreds, but about thirty 3-inch frogs were hopping all over the stairs and the ground near the drain and our front door. He quickly slammed the door. My mom spent her longest visit with us that evening, and then my sweetie had to escort her back to her car. But by then the rain had stopped and most of the frogs had moved on to bigger and better puddles.

The complex owners were kind enough to let us plant a small garden the second summer we spent there, but sadly, we turned our veggies over to the neighbors when we decided to move right before harvest time. It was a difficult decision to leave our families and friends and branch out on our own, but my sweetie had secured a good job in the Salt Lake Valley and I was anxious to complete my degree. So off we went…we didn’t miss the frogs.