third floors.
is the sky the limit or is the limit the sky?
I was raised in a series of apartments—eight in total from birth till the age of 17. (Add two brief stints in townhomes for a total of 10 different living spaces by the time I graduated high school.)
When I enumerate them that way, they present on paper as indicators of an unstable early life, a childhood spent bouncing from building to burg, never staying anywhere long enough to make or maintain any meaningful connections. In retrospect, that was the truth of it. But it never felt that way in the moment.
Despite my family’s frequent bouts of relocation, we were careful to replicate a single experience: living on the third floor.
Third-floor apartments were the highest and so, of course, the most coveted. They were the quietest, as the only four apartments in any 12-unit building where no one could be heard stomping, running, or arguing overhead. They were a haven for women without protectors, women tasked with devoting time, technique and strategy to protecting their own selves.
For us, it was simple calculation: an unwelcome encroacher—intruder, solicitor, neighborhood gossip masquerading as new confidante—had to climb two flights of stairs, past more than a handful of other homes to reach ours. The distance from the ground could offer a scant advantage, a potential 10-second lead on preventing what might’ve been coming.
And if anyone could bend that sliver of time to her will, it was a woman who had learned that she could only rely on God and herself.
I picked all of this up from my nana. Hers was the third-floor apartment I was born into. She’d moved into it just as my mother was starting high school; I was born a year after Mom graduated.
Nana never married. She’d had my mother a month after her own high school graduation in 1960. While my mother was young, she and Nana lived with her parents in Michigan, then with Nana’s brother in Connecticut, where she worked two jobs and attended night classes to learn court stenography. It was there that she started to live in apartments on her own, though I’m not sure if she knew right away which floor made her feel most secure. Maybe she’d come to that realization by trial and error, maybe by dint of bad experience.
She moved to Baltimore when I was three and landed a job in her new field fairly quickly. My mother and I followed Nana to Baltimore a year later and lived in her third-floor apartment there, as well as in the one she rented a year or two later—where she still lives today.
When Mom found her own place, I was 7. She’d also chosen a third floor apartment.
She must’ve inherited the same notion: a woman living alone, a single woman, particularly one with a little girl, should make a home that is high and away. She does well to live at the height of a building that is highest to scale, on the backside of building, facing lawn and green rather than a parking lot. She does well to live where the noise nearby needn’t be one more thing that keeps her up at night.
Three-floor apartment buildings rose to American prominence in the mid-20th century, compromises of construction existing somewhere between the tenement high-rise with its intentional overcrowding and the single-family home with its twin lures of individualism and privacy.
The best three-floor buildings often sit at the edges of suburbs, close enough to cul de sacs and quiet streets of homeowners to ensure that the surrounding grocery stores are well stocked, the public schools are relatively decent and those more permanent neighbors— the homeowners—have vested interest in keeping the community relatively safe.
Three-floor complexes are for strivers. They are designed for transition, for impermanence, for never forming lasting bonds with neighbors. The newer ones, especially, thrown up quickly to accommodate a rapid residential growth or redevelopment, are not invented for long-term living. They are meant to be turned over every 2-5 years, for older carpet to be ripped up and relaid, for fixtures and amenities to be updated, for rent to have new reasons for increase.
In apartments, as early as on lease-signing day, there is ever the expectation that you will leave.
I have done lots of leaving. So much that I don’t really know how to stay. I can’t imagine a more logical outcome for someone who spent her formative years at a dense cluster of pins on a Baltimore map.
I still do not quite know how to conceive of domestic permanence.
The apartment we’ve just moved into is my fourth. Like my mother and grandmother before me, I also live on the highest floor I can. But in this latest home, the highest floor is only the second. I’m told it’s because of the building layout and the size of the unit I’ve rented. It is strange to look out the windows here and find myself so close to the ground. It is strange to live in a space this large and low, to feel like there’s a little more home than I know what to do with. Only one set of stairs to climb, any lead time on potential calamity halved.
My daughter says this feels almost like a house. She would know. She lives in one, from time to time, with her father. She intends to own one when she grows up.
“I want to live in a cottage,” she says. “Or a house like Daddy-and-[Wife]. Not in an apartment like you and Nana.”
I tell her that’s a great aspiration. I also try to explain the concepts of credit and mortgage. I note that she’ll need a career with a salary that can pay for that cottage (and, ideally, a money-earning someone-she-loves to live with and share in its expense).
She tells me I can live with her there. I tell her she can live with me, wherever I am, whenever she needs to.
But I leave out the part about that brief bit of time earlier this year when I began to harbor a then-realistic hope of homeownership. I’d just started my second consecutive six-figure job and had not yet learned that my current one would end after only 4 months. The 8-month stint I’d spent in my last position, before that it ended in layoffs, had allowed me to save more money than I’ve ever saved in my life. Not an overly impressive amount to some, but a considerable amount for a third-generation single parent with no generational wealth.
It would’ve been enough for the down payment on a house and I’d quietly started looking for one.
I’ve never been someone who bothered aspiring to homeownership. It was too intangible a goal and, in some ways, an undesirable one for someone unaccustomed to sticking around.
But I have always wanted a less transient life for my daughter. It was why I was so reluctant to leave my nana’s apartment after being priced out of my own when my daughter was 1. I wanted to give her a sense of family and roots and familiarity.
We didn’t leave Nana’s for North Carolina until she was 9. We stayed in our old place in Durham for nearly 3.5 full years, extending my last lease renewal long enough for her to wrap up her school year without interruption.
It would’ve been nice if I could’ve made this most recent move into a single-family home, where she and I might’ve been able to spend the rest of her childhood.
As it stands, I don’t know where we’ll move next. But I can predict that we’ll move again soon. This new place—while lovely—is, for now, but a pricey experiment, and North Carolina has never felt like a final nesting place.
Still, it’s given me one thing I’ve not had anywhere else: a different perspective on what is safe to call a home, a beckoning up to my balcony, an urging to come down from the clouds.
I am constantly reminded here that there are other ways to live and to mother. Less fearful ways, less aloof. It’s become a clearer to me here what kind of room my imagination requires and how much higher it still may be able to fly than the height of an apartment’s third floor.