A few weeks ago we had new hall lights installed in the apartment hallways. These hallways are about 2 and a half feet wide and 10 feet long, and there used to be a round light fixture hanging in the center of the ceiling and shedding a warm glow that could never quite penetrate the corners near our apartment doors.

Now, at each end of the 10-foot-long hallway there’s a very helpful exit sign marking each stairwell door, and about 80% of the rest of the ceiling is covered with a rectangular bank of solid brightness. In the mornings, as I open my door to leave for work, this fluorescent phalanx assaults my entryway. In the evenings, when all the lights are out and I make my last check of the doors and windows, the front door glows with an unearthly light. I can see the door’s outline shimmering from the farthest reaches of the apartment.

You know how in sci-fi movies you can tell the mother ship is coming to experiment on the hapless humans when that cold light squeezes through shutters and keyholes? That’s the light. And every night my last thought before retiring is that the aliens are coming for me.

Our high temperature for the day was recorded at midnight (50s). At 6am it was in the 40s. Now it’s in the low, low 30s. We’re headed to the 20s by this afternoon. And we just had our first snow. Brrrrrr.

Every spring I take my blazers to the dry cleaners to make sure that they’re all clean and ready to wait through the summer for me until it’s cool enough for me to look at a jacket without breaking into a sweat. Well, this morning I took out my absolute favorite of these blazers for it’s first fall usage.

It’s a soft dusty pink color straight out of the 30s, soft, and multi-purpose. It’s one of those blazers that looks equally good as the top of a suit or over a pair of jeans, and I love it so much that I have to keep track of when I wear it so that I don’t become “pink blazer girl” at work.

Unfortunately, after putting it on this morning, I realized that there was a deep brown stain about an eighth of an inch in diameter smack on the front of this jacket just to the left of the single button. So, after my half-day at work today, I asked around about the location of a dry-cleaner in town and heard of a relatively new operation that not only cleans clothes but also hems and does “other things.” Sounds like the kind of local place that would take care of my precious jacket, I thought, and set off.

When I arrived, the storefront confused me a little bit. It said something about vacuum cleaners and small machines right next to the sign for dry cleaning. No matter, I thought, there are two entrances so one must be for the mechanic and the other for the tailor/dry-cleaner.

I pushed open the door closer to the dry cleaning sign and was greeted by the smell of grease. A middle aged man appeared through a break in a wall covered in wrenches and bolts, wiping greasy hands on a blackened rag.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

Rather uncertainly, I answered, “I’m looking for dry cleaning.”

“Picking up or dropping off?” he returned without missing a beat.

“Dropping off,” I answered, feeling less rather than more sure of myself.

“Well, let me to wash my hands or I’ll make the clothes worse than they were when you brought
them in.”

And with that he disappeared again and I heard vigorous hand-scrubbing coming from behind another wall. Meanwhile, his miniature white poodle wandered out, glanced at me with much the same slow, bored look his master had given me, and continued on into the machine shop.

“So, this is a jacket, huh?” He asked, taking my stained blazer from me.

The only other time I’ve taken a stained item to a cleaner, the cleaner grilled me about what the stain might be and when I’d inflicted it on my garment, so I’d marshaled my evidence in advance and steeled myself to the disapproving looks I knew I’d receive when I confessed that I didn’t know what it was or when it had gotten onto my clothing. I needn’t have feared. I doubt he’d have asked any questions even if I hadn’t blurted out my story right at the outset.

“Ok,” was his only comment, and then he turned his attention to the pants I’d brought in, also stained.

“I guess I’ll put these down as one pair of women’s slacks, then,” he thought out loud. “Yes.” He confirmed his diagnosis as I unfolded them to show their stain.

“Well, come back Tuesday after four, I’d say,” he continued in the same, slow tone, after taking my name.

I was expecting him to take my phone number, or to give me a slip of some sort, but that kind of formality just wouldn’t do in a shop where dry cleaning hangs next to repaired vacuum cleaners and where a perfectly white poodle keeps silent watch over his greasy master.

… when the whole world smells faintly of crushed asian lady beetles. I battle through a cloud of them between my car and work (biking through them is not an option), I use the entry-way of the library (between the two sets of doors) to dust myself off and make sure none are hitching a ride indoors in my hair, and I never talk while walking (and I certainly don’t yawn).

This morning I had the morning off (Oh Fraptious Day!), and the weather was sunny and 80 degrees. Yet all I could do was sit indoors and wish that there weren’t so many lady beetles, box elder bugs, wasps, and resurrected flies swarming my porch chair and screen. Actually going outdoors would have been ill-advised.

Every Sunday morning I drive through a small town in the middle of nowhere. It’s your typical depressed and calcifying town with dirt frontage roads, sea foam green ranch houses with 18-inch wide scalloped asbestos siding, and the shell of a four-store strip mall complete with a grass-invaded parking lot. One thing that sets this town apart from many other small towns in the area is that it has not one but two gas stations. Or at least, it had two gas stations.

A couple of months ago the BP gave up the struggle. But they didn’t take down any of their signs, or even remove old merchandise from the store windows. In fact, I don’t know exactly when the station closed, but I remember noticing three weeks ago that gas was still listed as $2.99/gallon there while prices at the other station in town had fallen to $2.67/gallon. This week, driving past, gas was still listed as $2.99/gallon while prices at the other station had fallen all the way to $2.12/gallon.

But that’s the only clue that the station is no longer operating. Merchandise still packs the windows and no grass has made inroads into it’s asphalt yet. Neither the “open” nor the “closed” sign hangs in the door. It’s as if time just stopped at this gas station somewhere between opening and closing time about 6 weeks ago.