The Comfort of Home

Video

Skinner in Her New Apartment

Virginia Skinner, who had lived in a tunnel on and off for about 12 years, moved into her own apartment in October.

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Virginia lists all the errands she must run, the furniture she must buy, the wait for sales, the bus routes, the dinner parties planned.

Transitions are never easy. Moves often are unsettling, packing and unpacking disturbing, as one tries to find places for things accumulated. Sometimes it is hard to sit still in a new place that is not quite home. Sometimes you can't sleep, wondering who possessed this place before. Who are the neighbors? Who is watching?

Virginia has taped shut the vertical blinds dangling from her windows, allowing no opening for outsiders to peek in. She is sure someone was inside her place when she stepped out.

"Somebody broke in already and stole a jar of cranberries," she says. "They took a gray blanket and my tape recorder." She used to record her thoughts on it. It was lying on the bed. She wants the management company to change the locks and put bars on the windows. "Then I will sleep better."

While making a new home, people often hold on to things from the past. Memories are constructed like bridges on which people traverse to and fro, from present to past, walking across the bridge into personal history to retrieve things. Like the crocheted blanket, the suitcase full of unfinished projects. Walking across the bridge of memory to visit the old house, just to see how it sits in the past. Taking two buses into the past to visit a tunnel where she once slept in a paper bedroom, because it had become more familiar than a bedroom with real walls.

The other day, Virginia went back to the tunnel -- just to take a nap. "I just felt more comfortable," she says. "I wound up sleeping there all night."

But she got up. And unlike before, she did not stay in the tunnel. She returned to the apartment. She has plans. Tomorrow, she will go shopping, go to the post office to get money orders to pay bills. See the dentist. She has to call her son in Arizona.

She leaves a message: "Hello, Damion, this is Mom. I tried to call before Christmas. I moved into an apartment. Call me. I love you."

She hangs up the phone. Virginia, the mother of five adult children, had refused repeated pleas over the years from her sister and children to move in with them. Her family said she suffered from schizophrenia, though Virginia denies it. "I haven't heard that," she says. Her sister says Virginia began living on the street after her life took a traumatic turn when her youngest daughter was a baby and was snatched from Virginia's grandmother's yard on Capitol Hill. The family says the baby's father took her. Virginia left her other children in search of the baby and spent years trying to find her, the family says. The girl, now in her 30s, was raised by relatives and eventually reunited with her siblings as an adult.

But Virginia doesn't want to talk about the search for that baby. Instead she talks about a new, imaginary baby she says she just had. (Social workers say she has told people over the past 12 years she was pregnant.) In her living room, there are two baby strollers and a crib. She says she told the management company she would be adding a name to the lease. "You know I have a baby. Yes, at some point the baby has to come stay with me," she says matter-of-factly.

Then she switches the subject.

"I've got to get one of those machines to clean the cabinets. A steam cleaner."