Sitting in the Sun

We're now entering our 8th month of living in a construction zone while the condo below ours is renovated after being gutted to the bricks. Our lobby has also been a filthy wreck for the past couple of months and we've had no working doorbells since September, thanks to the new owner's plans. Dust and dirt still pour into our place regularly, our doors no longer shut properly, and we have buckling floors, misaligned paneling, and big new cracks in our walls and ceilings, thanks to a few structural changes downstairs. 

The new owner has told us that he expects us to put up with all this quietly. In Boston, it's perfectly legal to torture your neighbors with incesssant construction noise between 7 am and 6 pm, and fill their homes with dust. He's also told us several times that we should be grateful to him because he's "doing so much to improve the building." But as I look at our cracks, and our doors, and the clouds of dust, and the ruined lobby, I'm not having much success with that. 

We've learned to cherish weekends. We're spared the yelling and banging that starts every weekday at 7 am and goes on until close to 5. We stay in as much as we can on weekends, reveling in the quiet. We can read! We can write! We can hear ourselves think! 

We probably have to endure just a couple more months of this, until the interior work is finished. But... then he plans to rip up the front and back gardens, re-landscape them, and fence them with brick and wrought iron. And I just learned that two buildings, right in front and in back of ours, are about to gut-renovated, too. This means that the noise may never end, and it could double just when our windows are finally open to the summer air.

But, today, it's lovely to see our calico, Bunnelina, basking peacefully in the sun. There's no generator roaring beneath her, no streams of profanity in a focking Irish accent, no workmen peeing in the garden behind her. This is something for which I can be briefly grateful.