The Already and the Not Yet

I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. We don't actually own the flat yet. We have had an offer accepted, and a genial bank has given us a mortgage, and there is a "Sorry, Sold" sign on one of the river-facing windows. Our solicitor is working with the seller's solicitor for an earlier move-in date. The seller lives out of town, so this shouldn't be a problem.

All the same, I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. It is on the second floor (i.e. on the first floor by European counting) of a two-storey row house built in 1930. It is accessible by a wide concrete staircase, which leads up to a west-facing front door. There are five windows facing west over the gardens (two in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one over the front door, and one in the front bedroom) and three, I think, facing the river across the street (two in the sitting-room and one I the back bedroom). For some reason, the flat has been demarcated on the west side by a coat of reddish-ochre paint. B.A. likes this and says it is authentic.

This morning's was my third visit to the flat since we bought put in an offer for it. My purpose was to see where in the garden the sun falls in the morning. Yesterday I dropped by to see where the sun fell in the afternoon. The raised beds at the back of the garden, under the apple tree, seem to be always in shade.

Yes, we have (or will have) an apple tree, and the Lady Downstairs told us on our first visit that it gives good eating apples. The Lady Downstairs has a wider strip of garden than we do, but no fruit trees. The departed tenant of our flat used to give her apples, she hinted, and we promised that if our bid was successful, we would keep the apples coming.

The apple tree clinched the deal for me (does anyone ever say 'clinched 'anymore?), to be honest. My first surprise was that the two bedroom flat came with a private garden at all. For over a year, off and on, I have been looking at affordable flats in Edinburgh and environs, and it never dawned on me that one might conceivable come with a private garden. A shared concrete chessboard with laundry lines stretched across it, yes. A sad strip of grass covered in cigarette butts, certainly. But a private garden, no.

For the first time since my Mediaeval Herbal Phase, I have been reading gardening books.

Meanwhile, we are still living in one big room (with ensuite) in the New Town, loaned to us by a generous friend for a peppercorn rent, which goes to her proper tenants, who suddenly found themselves with both housemates and an income-stream. It is a beautifully proportioned room, an excellent shelter after an evening of admiring the architecture of the New Town.

However, the wi-fi connection is weak, which means I go to the Historical House to work, and we are shy of intruding upon the proper tenants in the kitchen, which means either cold food or the microwave. Then there is the problem of two married people who cannot politely get away from each other. B.A. sleeps lightly and late, so in the morning I make a chair out of two pillows on the other side of the closed floor-length drapes and there read five pages of Książe Kaspian.

If we were newlyweds in our twenties this would be sooooooo romantic. Sadly, we aren't.

So while sitting on the steps to our new flat, whose keys we do not yet have, I think about how nice it will be to go indoors and have a kitchen and sitting-room again. The irony, of course, is that the New Town is arguably the best place in all Edinburgh to live, and we will be much older and richer before we even have the opportunity to do so again. I think sadly of the violent assault that befell a young man on our new street, but then there was an actual murder in the New Town a year and a half ago, so You Never Know.

We have a new flat---and we don't have a new flat. It's like the Already and the Not Yet I was told about in theology school. Since the Incarnation, the Kingdom of God is already here. But on the other hand, it's not fully yet here. Since Christ's self-sacrifice, we get to go to heaven. But on the other hand, we haven't got to heaven yet.

So sitting on the steps to the new flat, looking at the garden, is a bit like contemplating the heaven we have been offered but can't get into yet--and might not get into, if we slip up egregiously. Still, we are pretty hopeful we will not slip up that egregiously, and that we will get the keys to both places.

The other thing about looking at the garden is that it reminds me of my childhood garden (or "backyard" as Canadians usually call the land behind a house). This is a little bit sad, for when I sat on the swings in my childhood garden, I wished with all my might to be grown-up and somewhere else---perhaps romantic Britain! And now I am grown-up and in romantic Britain, and I think about the old backyard, and my thirty-something mother climbing up the cellar steps with a basket of wet laundry to hang out.

Oh, aye. How young we all were once--and presumably will be again one day!