My New House

Last week I moved into the attic of a creaky old house.

Perhaps that would be a fitting statement coming from a ghost, but that statement is mine. I really did move into a large old house. The wooden flooring has been redone newly and that creaks with every footstep that falls anywhere in the house. And yes, I seem to hear creaks and thuds sometimes when I’m alone in the house, and I’m not sure if they are just inside my head or it’s one of ‘them’.

The house is three-storied above the ground with a basement underneath and a garage large enough to hold two cars. There are two rooms and a bathroom in the attic: I and my Turkish friend Sonay Aikan live in these two rooms and share the bathroom. We share the kitchen on the ground floor with the landlord who is also a professor in our university. He has just bought this house and so that makes all three of us new inhabitants. Unfortunately, this lovely house tends to remind me of old English suspense and horror movies. There is a large drawing room on the ground floor that is connected to the Flu Network (in mugglespeak, that means it has an old fashioned fireplace) and has huge mirrors on both sides of the mantelpiece. Also, there is a dining room apart from the kitchen on this floor. There’s a fully livable apartment in the basement as well, complete with a bathtubbed bathroom and a fully equipped kitchen. There are three bedrooms on the second floor (now that I’m in the US, I won’t call it the first floor anymore) and a hall. The rooms in the attic are large, full-sized rooms. However, since these rooms are fit under a sloping roof, part of the ceiling is sloping and the windows on my south wall are rounded in shape which, according to my sister, gives the room a ‘Hobbity’ appearance.

But the thing that excited me most in this house was my discovery of a stack of old gramophone records. It contains an assortment of Western Classical, Spanish music, Christmas songs, old Broadway musicals and I’m not sure what else. I’m crazy about LPs and the sound quality they offer, and so I’m trying to get hold of a turntable so that I can listen to them. People in this country seem to be irritated about the fact that winter is approaching, but since I have never seen snow in my life, I am pretty excited about the visions of a white Christmas spent listening to old LP records (like we always did back home) sitting in front of a fireplace.

Maybe things won’t look so rosy when I have to plough my driveway in the morning before walking to the university through knee deep snow and bone chilling wind, but there’s no harm in daydreaming till then!