“THIS APARTMENT IS MAGICAL,” my Aunt Analeia once remarked, sitting in her armchair, which was covered with fabric the color of a robin’s egg, her hair tied up high with the help of a sharp, silver pin. She had said those words with a mischievous look, as if daring me to ask what she meant. I had just turned eight and thought I knew everything.
Of course, the apartment was magical. My aunt lived in a building that was a century old, on the Upper East Side, with stone lions on the awnings, half-broken, clinging to the corners. Everything in that apartment was magical: The way the light bathed the kitchen in the mornings, golden like the yolk of an egg. The way the desk seemed to hold more books than was possible, overflowing from the shelves and piled up in front of the window at the back, so high that they almost hid all the light. I used to draw maps of foreign lands on the opposite brick wall of the living room. The bathroom, with its flawless tall window and milky glass, on which rainbows spread, against the backdrop of blue walls and the bathtub with ornate curved feet, was the perfect place for me to paint. My watercolors truly came alive there, the colors dripping from my brushes as I imagined distant places I had never traveled to.
And at night, the moon seemed so close, as it appeared through the windows of my aunt’s bedroom, that I could almost touch it. The apartment was truly magical. And even if you tried to convince me otherwise, you wouldn’t succeed. I simply believed that it was my aunt who made it magical – the way she lived, cheerful and clever, transmitting that energy to everything she touched.
