One advantage of living in someone else's house is detaching from my obsessions--changing decor or colors or even simple switcheroos of chairs.  

Living in someone else's house is also a study in the art of differences.  It's a pleasure to visit or sleepover in a house very unlike one's own, but it's a whole other thing to actually take up residence, meet the neighbors, and get to know the town a little better. 

Carlene keeps everything.  Furniture stays put.  She files operating instruction and keeps the boxes. In my house,  I couldn't lay my hands on either as they have long since gone into recycling.  

If I stacked all the greeting cards Carlene has kept, it would be floor to ceiling several times over.  Same with  photos.  

She gave me carte blanche to organize, and that's my jam!  I sat on the floor for hours reading cards, many of which my children and I sent to "Nana and Granddaddy."   I see Mimi's  (her mother's) handwriting, so tiny I can barely decipher it. 

One day, I chose a few cards and bundled them to take to Carlene's apartment and she loved the short visits from the past as much as I had.  I've found packets from old film stores I mailed her decades ago  (Remember Foto-mat?) and wondered why I had needed to capture every expression on my baby Day's face--the way we do with first babies. 

I don't make huge changes. Mostly I just re-stack and re-sort, kind of like editing a piece of writing.   

This morning she was reading her college magazine and she saw that her college roommate had died.  Her name was Helen, but she went by her nickname, Illy--because, Illy said, she was "illegitimate." 

A name from the past, it made us laugh.  A word, a line of a letter--it's like a needle that pulls up threads from all over the place. 

Another fun bit about living in someone else's house is that when you go out, you hear the words and expressions you don't hear at your other home.  "Can I get you a buggy?" a clerk asks in a store.  Not a shopping cart, a buggy.  

I'm not a party person, neither is Bob.  Carlene is the most extroverted one in our original family of four.  Her door is always open.  People can stop by without calling first, just open the door and call out, "Hey!"  She's a good listener and her visitors love that.  Everyone wants to be listened to. 

She's made her new apartment home and every night she tells me about conversations with people at lunch or breakfast. Her new friend whose surname is also Harris is blind from glaucoma, and Carlene enjoys pushing her back to her room and getting to know her better.  She likes listening to their stories, just as she's done for decades at this home.