Hanging Planters

My name is Chris, my wife's name is Chrissy, and we live above a coffee shop. It would be cool enough if we happened to live above a Starbucks or a Pete's but, as luck would have it, we found a large one bedroom apartment in the second story of an old Victorian with an independent coffee house down below. It is named the Naked Lounge and the walls are covered with tasteful paintings of undressed women in repose. We found this apartment by chance when we were looking for places to live.

We're what most people would consider old fashioned. We chose not to live together before we were married. So a few weeks before our wedding we were in the market for an apartment when Chrissy's mom asked us if we'd like to grab coffee with her. Chrissy has always loved this drink called the bowl of soul that Naked makes so she suggested that we go there. When we got to the shop, there was a rent sign on the front of the building. We called the landlord, and we got the apartment.

So this is our first house. And it's a great place to live. The neighborhood's a little sketchy at times. There's a park across the street where the city's homeless used to congregate before the police upped their patrols, and there's a light rail station behind us that can bring some interesting characters from all over the city into our neck of the woods, but the building we live in is peaceful.

There are only three tenants: ourselves, our next door neighbor Nisha, and the coffee shop downstairs. Nisha is a good neighbor. We rarely ever see her and she grabs our mail for us if we're out of town. She works for a non-profit that she's never really identified. She is in her mid to late twenties, but she has thinning hair. At first, I thought she might be undergoing chemo, but lately Ive just been thinking she's one of those rare unfortunate women who loose their hair. It doesn't seem to bother her too much though.

The Coffee shop is always busy. It is filled, mostly, with rich privileged college kids trying desperately hard to look like anything other than what they actually are. They're harmless really with their faux-hawks and their multicolored tattoos and their double espressos and their cigarettes.

You can tell which ones are really trying by their brand of cigarettes. Marlborough Lights are looked upon like training wheels. The obvious, and accepted, alternative to lights are Marlborough Reds. Then there are the novelty smokers. They smoke mostly cloves and cigars of varying, consistently low, quality. They're in it for the fun, and they don't think of themselves as smokers really. There is always some older gentleman smoking a pipe. He is older than the rest of the patrons and, by all rights he shouldn't be hanging out in this glorified soda jerk with all these kids, but his pipe is pretty cool and this is a tolerant youth group after all. Finally, every once in a while, you will see the Pall Mall unfiltered. Depending upon who is smoking these they are either the coolest damn leaves ever to be rolled into a paper and smoked, or they're the lamest attempt to curry favor with a realm of hipsters where one obviously does not belong.

The people working in the shop (They would punch me in the face if I referred to them as barristas) are mostly kids who used to sit out front. They probably would have continued to do so indefinitely except for the fact that their revenue stream dried up. Out of money, and with little motivation (but a lot of caffeine enhanced energy and probably a couple of Pall Malls left to share) they just kind of stood up, wondered inside and asked if anyone was hiring. The workers are the real deal whom the patrons are trying to emulate. They are disaffected, relatively poor, youth. I'm not sure whether they themselves are aware of the irony that they represent but I'm pretty sure I've seen them toss a handful of grinds into the cups of those customers which they have deemed to be the least authentic.

Finally, there's us. At the risk of sounding like an idiot I'd say my wife and I are the most normal people in our building. We work Monday through Friday, we help out with our church youth group, We have friends over and go out to dinner. We're pretty normal, by a certain definition of the word anyway.

The most shocking discovery of our first year of marriage has been that babies come from people having sex. At least, that's where ours is coming from. I know this may not sound revelatory to you but, trust me, when the theory of a thing, no matter how accurate, is replaced by the reality of life it can be pretty eye opening.

My wife is pregnant with our first child. I'm excited about it! I'm also scared to death. But she's great about all of this and she's confident we'll figure it all out. Meanwhile, I'm trying to get everything ready for the kid. Which brings us to the Planters.

Chrissy wants to do cloth diapers. I'm not as stoked on the cloth but am willing to give it a shot. However, our apartment isn't really that big and unless we come into some unforeseen load of cash we're gonna be here for a while. In light of that, I wanted to set something up so the diapers could be stored outside. We live on the second story, and I didn't want anything to look unsightly, so I came up with the idea of hanging large planter. I hung one for drying and one for the diapers once they've dried. It actually looks pretty good.

And that is life above a coffee shop for now. We don't have everything figured out, but we've got our planters up and we're getting by.