Burger heaven Stealing lilacs and time as I wait for the perfect home BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

There are times when you make risky decisions about your future — immediate or looming — and say, "what the hell, let it come." I did such a thing recently, as summer finally began to waft through my screens like a much-needed aphrodisiac: I gave up my expensive and beautiful apartment.

For July 1.

"Okay, I’m insane," I confess to my father over the phone. Yet, if I go back over all of the thoughts and conversations (with myself) that led up to it, it went something like: "My lease is up at the end of August. Another $1000 winter paying for Iraqi oil might just kill me. I may as well move now to get it over with. How hard is it to find an apartment in Portland anyways? And besides, Ronald Reagan was an American Hero."

Despite the fact that my Dad said, "Don’t you think you better wait till you have a place?," I imagined a beautiful, sunny, breezy, wood-floored, $700 one-bedroom-plus-den, with views of Casco Bay, heat and hot water included, a little garden outside to take my cat Ellison out on her leash, and peonies blooming in the front yard.

I also imagined what I’d lose: the high heat and hot water bills, the clomping on my head from the lead-footed upstairs neighbor, the stone wall next to the driveway falling further on my car, my rent going up in September, plastic on my windows, fights with Northern Utilities, and, the most painful, a new neighbor in Erika’s apartment.

So I gambled. And, in this case, you might say the house is ahead. It turns out, contrary to the convictions of this chick’s fuzzy mind of dreams, finding an apartment in Portland is nearly impossible. I’m starting to feel like I used to in New York City, when I first moved there and I was living with my friend Marina in her studio — sharing a bed and a job search, which is enough to kill any good friendship — while my cat peered out the one window in the apartment and looked back at me lying prostate on the bed to say, "What have you done to us?"

I fear that look now.

I would show up with my idiot, high-heeled "agent," named Deelia (or some other bastardization of Delilah), who would be clutching a stack of sweaty papers with lists of apartments that were supposedly exclusive to her. We’d climb some creaky stairs up to a place being shown by six other agents with 10 other girls the spitting image of myself.

There was the Sunday paper listing route, too, which proved as daunting as showing up at an audition calling for an "intelligent blonde, 5’ 6" or 7", blue eyes, good sense of irony" (turns out there were about a million of us in NYC).

I think the thing that is so disappointing — or depressing, depending on how you look at it — is losing the world you dreamt up for yourself after you read about that perfect apartment in the Real Estate section. You try (as hard as you might try to get a boyfriend) to score this imagined life, and before you know it you’re like the girl who just met her date and is already picturing what the babies will look like.

I saw the perfect place on Emery Street at the beginning of June. It was quiet, had a backyard, had gorgeous floors and a big front stoop — and the landlord seemed flexible on his price, even willing to come down to mine. It seemed my worries were over. I had scored, baby.

So began an insane 10 days of phone calls to find out if and when he might process my application. Then my calls started going straight to voice mail. I left message after message. Nothing. Silence.

Meanwhile, my friend Aliya and I did a burger binge. We spent four nights making burgers together, then taking her dog Sarah Bean out for walks around the West End. Glasses of Syrah tinkling in our hands, we walked by "my" apartment on Emery street and imagined how great our lives would be once I lived that close by. One night, late, we took scissors and Hannaford bags and pilfered some last pungent lilacs, and one pink peony bud each from someone’s garden. I thought of Jane Kenyon’s poem that calls peonies "Outrageous flowers as big as human heads!" as we snipped and saw no blood, then hurried down the street into the dark.

Come Sunday night, Aliya and I had eaten exclusively burgers for four days and I had put on four pounds according to my scale. We had analyzed every possible voice mail and message and conversation with the Emery Street landlord with the same kind of care we would take to analyze every fucking thing about a guy one of us liked — all to no avail.

After yoga, I went to Wild Oats to scare up some dinner and all I could think of was "burgers," so I bought some meat, cheese, tomato, lettuce, and onion and went home to make my fifth burger in five days. I worried for a minute about the carb content of Catsup but then thought, "oh, fuck it," and slathered my gleaming cheese burger with the red sticky stuff.

A real estate agent told me that landlords are looking for the perfect heterosexual (even) couple of "young professionals" — two lawyers or two doctors. As I got into bed, my belly full of burger, my stolen pink peony winking at me from my bedside table, I decided, "okay, fine, on my next application I’ll write, ‘single woman who makes a mean burger on a hot summer evening.’ "

Stories, thoughts, ideas, apartment leads, and nominations for the best burger joints in Portland? Email Caitlin Shetterly at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com