have a seat

I enter the grad student office, a brand new, very large room with plenty of desk space and comfortable chairs, and where do I choose to sit? On the windowsill. One wall of the room is lined with huge recessed windows, twelve of them. I picked the one at the end, in the corner of the room, partially hidden by a filing cabinet. Is anyone surprised?

The one feature of my old apartment that I loved most was the huge picture window in the living room with its long, cushioned windowseat. I spent many a sunny afternoon napping there, and sometimes I sat there with a bowl of cereal as I surveyed the morning school-day traffic below. I could often be found there late at night working on a paper, and not a few times I fell asleep there and would wake up in an hour or so and drag myself to bed. One night, I was just so comfortable there that I fell asleep in the windowseat and did not wake up until well into the morning. Claire had been up all night working on an assignment and left the house early to run an errand on campus. As she was going out the door, she saw me there, asleep and facing the window, which was not covered by its blinds. I guess she considered waking me but just thought it was sort of funny and decided to let me sleep anyway. She told me later that as she was walking to campus she looked up at our window and there I was for the whole world to see, with my face practically pressed up against the glass, my mouth wide open. And when she returned, I had hardly moved a muscle. Do you have any idea how many people walk by that window on their way to school in the morning? Neither do I, but it is a lot. Being on the second floor, we did not normally get people gazing in through our window, but I hope that a good number of them just happened to look up that morning. Because it was sort of funny.

My new apartment was furnished, but I am a little confused. Although we seem to have excess furniture in the areas of clothes dressers and writing desks, the bedrooms are bereft of chairs. maybe they just figured we could sit on the dresser, in the closet, since that is the only place it seems to fit? Oh well, at least I have a windowseat.