Moleskin 3.4: Another Move

The following spring found us settling into our second urban home. It wasn’t a big move, four blocks, and I kept the same friends and the same paper route. I don’t even remember the U-Haul this time, but the transition was still remarkable: our townhome life was now squeezed into an apartment, with dinner smells in the hallways and yappy dogs behind neighbors’ doors. Dad’s station wagon was no longer the primary transportation; now it was a coupe: Mom’s no-frills Dodge Dart. We no longer had our own garbage cans: now it was a big dumpster a dozen yards down the sidewalk from our doors. We never had much of a yard to mow at the townhome, but now we were limited to garden pots on a 3 x 6 patio. It was what our mother could afford on nursing home wages.  Not that there was much to grumble about: my friends all lived in townhomes and duplexes, if not apartments, and we were hardly the only latchkey kids in the neighborhood. None of us lived very far away from the drainage ditch, and everything was still an adventure.