Tell Me About the Earthworms, George

Two months after George and I married, we relocated to a college town near his office so that I could finish school. George was working an entry level job in a field that was barely related to his degree. I was unemployed but hoping to find a part time position on campus to help with our expenses. To say that we were living on meager means is generous. We only had one car and George needed it for his commute so we had to find a cheap apartment within walking distance to campus in an area where hopefully we would not be raped and pillaged on a weekly basis. For George, the icing on the apartment cake was to find this cheap apartment in an ideal location WITH all bills paid. Yes, he dared to dream the dream.

Because this apartment hunting happened several years ago before the Internet was what it is today, and  because we were in a serious time crunch to get moved before the start of the fall semester, we had to make quick decisions with limited information. So we found our first apartment in our new town and let me just say that it met all of George's expectations but none of mine. I guess you could say that he had a better grip on reality because I felt certain that we could find Barbie's dream townhouse located in a picturesque park setting just on the edge of campus, and of course the rent would be just a small token of George's paycheck. Alas, I'm not sure which rock I'd been living under but I had a rough encounter with Reality, she had that heroin chic look except without the chic.

So our all bills paid close to campus cheap apartment was the stuff of which shanty towns are made. Imagine, if you will a time, when off campus college housing resembled army barracks or better yet, a minimum security prison. Think 1940s but institutional 1940s not Frank Lloyd Wright 1940s. Then picture this same complex about 50 years later with the only improvements being fresh paint in drab dismal colors to camouflage the grime from the previous tenants and the thinnest carpet ever known to man, and now you have our apartment. It, or The Cave as I called it, had cinder block walls which had been painted elephant gray. Now I ask you, if you are going to go the trouble of painting cinder block, why would you paint it gray? The carpet was also the same drab gray and appeared to be original to the building. I won't lie, I cried the day we moved in but I knew this was only temporary. It was only temporary because I would only agree to sign a six month lease. I figured that in six months, we would have time to learn the city and find something better that fit in our budget.

Our ground level apartment held a small surprise for us which we soon discovered after a good soaking rain. You see, while our apartment was technically on the ground level, the parking lot sat just a little higher than our front door and apparently a genius of an engineer designed the parking lot so that the rain runoff would head straight under our front door.The only thing we could do to keep our apartment from flooding was to pile towels at the door to soak up the rain. Well, when the rain subsided and we went to hang the wet towels to dry in our bathroom, we were a little startled to find that our wet towels were now threaded with earthworms. Yes, threaded. The earthworms were half in and half out of the towel and something had to be done. George wanted to throw away the towels but I refused. We were, after all, saving for a nicer place to live and if we threw away the towels, then we'd just have to buy more and surely it would eventually rain again. As a matter of fact, it seemed to rain a lot that fall and each rain brought along a new crop of earthworms. George, who I learned in those first few months of our marriage, does not like earthworms in the slightest and he absolutely refused to touch them. So I made him stand in the bathtub and hold open each towel as I, yes, I pulled each worm free from the towels. There must have been a hundred of those suckers, and I dangled each one in George's face just so I could watch him squirm, and boy did we laugh until I thought we would both pee our pants. 

Yes, that apartment was a dump in every sense of the word, but that is where we began our marriage. While we didn't have much in the way of materialistic things, those newly married months were some of the best times in my life. We were so happy just to be together that all the earthworms in the world couldn't take the joy out of the life we were creating together. It's funny how much less you think you need when you are head over heels in love with someone.