Through the hole in the floor

My place is *shiny* and there are even a few socks in the newly tightened drawers. I spent the day scrubbing with my cleaner Catherine and assembling furniture and moving things around and testing out my new washer and installing a new toilet seat and figuring out how the garbage room works etc. The place is really becoming something that feels like home.

I had time to wander out for more fair trade coffee and a famous kensington empanada today. The restaurant crammed with polite but firm lunch time gobblers, $3.50 for an excellent chicken jumbo empanada, run by chileans and staffed by a wide array of immigrants. Standing at the counter waiting for my lunch to heat up, I noticed movement under my feet and could see through the vent into the basement, east african men churning out the empanadas, south american women running them upstairs. Melissa always says I am too persnickity about cleanliness to travel to a developing country; I think the cooking arrangements in the market will cure me of that.

I still feel like I haven't let myself feel *of* the neighbourhood at all -- I keep emerging, blinking, into the bustle of the street, feeling streaked with dust, hair lank, my baggy cambodian-made Levi's (the ones bought in a Walmart in Taos New Mexico) a reproach to the casual of-my-very-soul clothes everyone on the street sports. I went into the flower store downstairs, chatted with the gals who run it and bought a money tree, laughed about how I have an ex who taught me how to water plants through misting the leaves, never water-logging the soil, how everyone in our lives brings us something.

Am heading back now with D to do some furniture assembling. I feel like I'm well on my way to being able to settle in.