thisendoftheswamp

First of all, I do not understand how it can be so difficult to find our house in broad daylight.  We live directly on a state highway, not down some winding drive through a development, and have a very distinctive mailbox. The man who came today to cart off the junk we cleaned out of the shed and the barn managed to get hopelessly lost, driving past us about five miles in each direction. He was about an hour later than he had planned, and probably used up half his profit in gasoline, poor soul.

By the time The Squire got finished this morning, he had collected five bucketsful of nails, screws, old hinges, doorknobs, and unmatched nuts and bolts. (Yesterday he only had two buckets, so I don’t know what he was doing out there.) He also tossed out fifteen – I stood and counted them! – empty paint cans, most so rusty they were more colander than can. I am fairly sure I could have listed those buckets of bolts on FreeCycle and have dozens of takers, including my best friend’s husband. However, I’m not mean enough to do that to another woman!

The main thing we wanted removed was a pile of old shingles from behind the barn, and the fellow got them all, even trying to dig them out where they had settled under the dirt. We told him to leave those. Several years ago, a young man we knew was trying to start his own home improvement business, and we hired him to replace the barn roof and take the old shingles to the dump. He did cart off the ones from the front of the barn, but he let the back shingles slide to the ground and then left them. We did not hire him for any more projects.

I have been spending my time sorting out old photos. Some folks I recognize, but others look vaguely familiar, but are not labeled. And I must have a dozen studio portraits of my mom and dad together, each beautifully framed, but oh! my goodness, what am I to do with them all. And what is the story behind one snapshot of my mum as a child, sitting on some lady’s lap, with the person standing behind them neatly cut out of the picture? Very interesting. I’m mailing the pictures of people I know to their (in most cases) descendants, and I’ve trashed a grocery bag full.

What is really frustrating is that many of those pictures have obviously been removed from a photo album, as there is black paper stuck to the backs.  The Squire’s aunt kept a beautiful album, from her childhood to the early years of her marriage, and she had always promised the album to him, so he could use it for his genealogy work. When she died, The Squire spoke to his cousin, and reminded her that he had been promised “all your mom’s pictures”. Several weeks later, he received a very lumpy envelope in the mail. His cousin had pulled every single snapshot from the album and sent them off. When he called to ask what had become of the album itself, his cousin replied “Well, I didn’t think you’d want all that old writing and stuff, so I just sent you the pictures, like you asked, and burned the book with the trash.”

I thought he was going to cry.

If our family had a coat of arms, the motto on it would have read “Wurfen Nicht!” – Don’t throw it away! Some day, it will come in handy.

The Godson is in the tenth grade, and over Labor Day weekend, his history teacher gave the class an assignment to write up a “newspaper” (although there obviously was no such thing at the time) about the Black Plague. Now, parts of our little village are not exactly the “high rent district” and not every child has access to both a computer and a printer in their own home. Being a holiday weekend, the library was only open on Saturday, so the other two days were pretty much wasted.

His mother mentioned to me that only one student in the class had managed to complete the assignment, and The Godson was all in a swivet. However, they had been given until Friday; schools were closed on Thursday for Rosh Hashanah, but the library was open. While I was talking to her on the phone, I wandered into our library/computer room and poked around on the shelves. “I have two books here. One is simply The Black Death, and the other is In the Wake of the Plague. Do you want to bring him over here?  He can use our computer and printer, and we have Publisher. (The teacher had reminded the students that “newspapers have columns”. Doing that sort of thing, plus adding a headline,  with Word is danged tricky.) She laughed so hard I though she was going to choke.

“You are the only person in the world who would have those two books right at your fingertips.”

That’s me. Lady Anne – faster than the Internet.

I’ve noticed for the last few days that my left foot was particularly sore, and my leg seemed weak.

The stroke I had in July has left some residual weakness on the left side, and I have already made an appointment with my neurologist to see about my poor busted discs, which is generally why my feet hurt. Today, my left calf and foot are rather badly swollen, and I am limping like Walter Brennan.

Lovely.

I’ve had phlebitis once before and ended up having to give myself Coumadin shots, which are more painful than labor pains and a tooth ache at the same time. Two shots, three times a day. Good Lord, deliver us.  Rather than wait until tomorrow and try to get in to see my GP, The Squire took me down to Patient First, which is Hopkins’ own “Doc in a Box”.  Not as long a wait as a regular ER, and truly good care. Just as well we didn’t have to wait long, as I was about to strangle the family across from us. A woman who sounded like Bernadette’s mother-in-law from The Big Bang Theory and her two daughters, all three of whom were texting each other. The mother’s ring tone sounded like a quacking duck, and every once in a while she would reprimand one or the other of the girls for not answering her text.

There are some facets of modern life I’d just as soon not even try to understand.

Anyway, I have a referral to have a sonogram of my left leg done tomorrow morning. Was the stroke caused by something breaking loose deep in my leg last month? Why does all this keep happening? My cholesterol is at a decent level, my blood pressure is really pretty low (112/54 on Wednesday and 120/70 today), and Heaven knows I don’t lead a stressful life. If we don’t get this untangled, The Squire is going to have a stroke of his own.

When my folks moved back to Baltimore from Roxboro, they had far more “stuff” than they could fit into the new house. The Vicarage was a big old place, built before the turn of the last century, with twenty foot rooms and twelve foot ceilings and it was packed. Because of my dad’s health, they had to move quickly and the house they (my mum, really) purchased was much smaller than the Vicarage. This would not have been too bad, if she hadn’t insisted upon keeping everything. My mother was a school teacher and my dad was a clergyman, and collecting books was an occupational hazard. Add that to my mum’s general hoarding, and they were just about run out of the house.

So. They bought a 10 x 10 Amish shed and put it on our lot, filled it with their excess belongings and honestly figured they’d be back from time to time to empty a box or two. Obviously, that was not how it worked out. The Squire and I have spent most of this week doing the dance they call “Cleaning Out the Shed”. We are not so much cleaning it out as spreading it around the carport. Between this mess and trying to finish up the last of the kitchen wall paper, I am fast losing what little sanity I ever had.

Pack-rattery runs in my family the way buck teeth and red hair run in more conventional families. My parents’ professions meant lots of books, so we have boxes and boxes and more boxes of books to investigate.  For better or worse, these boxes reek of mildew or The Squire and I – both first-class “bookies” – would cart all of them into the house for ourselves. Many of them are old and probably valuable. There’s one written by Vice-Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten.  I just can’t bring myself to toss that one into the recycling, even if it does smell funky. Some of my dad’s books will go back to Sewanee for re-gifting, but most will have to be trashed.

But – why would a woman who lived in a third floor apartment of a retirement center have a garden hose under her bed? Why did we find FIVE packages of poker chips, four of them unopened. (Do you need poker chips to play pinochle?)  A box marked “Eleven drinking glasses. Twelfth packed elsewhere.” And no, I haven’t found it yet.

Now, the object of all this fun and games is to load the shed onto a flatbed and take it over to our church to store lawnmowers and the like. The way things go around here, it will probably vibrate into dust, like the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, on the way into Joppatowne.

We have been invaded by invisible spiders.

I can use the Swiffer around the edges of the ceiling and on the corners of all the doors in the morning and by the next day there are tiny cobwebs right back in the same place.  I have found spider webs between the shampoo bottle and the side of the shower stall. The Squire left the seat up one night and I found webs between the seat and the toilet tank in the morning. The dining room chandeliers have to be cleaned everyday because they look as if they came directly from the Munsters.

The sneaky little things can spin invisible webs between the house and the trellis in the garden in no time at all. That’s always interesting when I go out to get the paper in the morning. As the poet said, “A nest of spiders in her hair”. No, wait. That was a nest of robins, wasn’t it? Hmm. I think I’d prefer spiders, frankly.

This morning I got up and walked into a web spun between the bedpost and the window! Lucky it was me rather than The Squire. That poor man would have just gone up in a puff of smoke. His dresser is on my side of the bed, but he gets his socks and such in the evening before he goes to bed so he doesn’t awaken me in the morning.

When I came downstairs this morning, The Squire informed me that we had had visitors while he was eating breakfast. He was going to come up and get me, but they said they couldn’t stay long. However, they did agree to pose for a few photos.

Mama and her daughter were walking up from the road, headed towards the woods behind us, just as nonchalant as you please.

The fawn came over to the den window to see what The Squire was doing, and apparently stayed for quite a while peering in the window.

The cat wandered up to see what this “long-legged dog” might be. The fawn stomped her foot several times, a warning for Sir Edmund to skedaddle. Apparently, Eddie hadn’t read the rule book, as he got almost close enough to sniff the fawn’s foot before the fawn went back to Mama, shaking her head in bewilderment at that dumb cat.

I cannot imagine living anyplace else on this earth.

Maybe it’s just my German background, but I do tend to make things more difficult than they need to be.

Take gift cards, for instance. I don’t like them. Don’t like to get them, and don’t like to give them. Now, when our rector got married he’d already owned his home for a decade and they wanted to do some remodeling, so he suggested that unless we could find a way to gift wrap a couple of ten foot 2x4s, gift cards to one of the home improvement stores would really be the best thing. “I already have plenty of Tupperware.”

But for the most part, gift cards leave me with the feeling that “I couldn’t be bothered to pick out something I thought you’d like, so go buy your own danged present”.

And wall paper. I like wall paper very much;  painted walls put me in mind of a model home.  Last Sunday at church I was discussing the fact that I’d overdone it a bit by starting to paper the kitchen. Somebody piped up and asked me why I didn’t just put a coat of paint on the wall and be done with it. And that’s exactly why I didn’t paint – I like the feeling that I have taken the time and effort to search out exactly the paper that suits our personalities.  A coat of paint is the easy way out. And I understand that there are folks who put every bit as much time, thought, and effort into the color paint they use in the living room, but that’s not me.

Ah, well. Too German for my own good, I guess.

Yesterday, both The Squire and I tried to settle into our old routine.

I mentioned that I had noticed a funky smell in the bathroom, which turned out to be a leak in the tank, and resultant rotten floor boards. Lovely. Just lovely. Two or three trips to Home Depot, much grunting and groaning, a helpmeet who put the wax seal on upside down, and I think it’s fixed. There is a kit to patch the leak – which is a very small one, but had been going on for quite some time – which needs to be installed, but that will be tackled tomorrow or soon after.

It has rained every day for the last two weeks, so if it is nice tomorrow, The Squire needs to hit the lawn mower; we are in no immediate danger of falling into the crawl space but we are apt to disappear behind the tall grass, so priorities need to be set.

I decided it was time to get back on the job in the kitchen. The floor is down, the cabinets are in, and now I need to get the wallpaper up.  I guess most kitchens are odd spaces and weird cuts, and you are just thankful for the few places where you can go ahead and put up a swath or two. The space between the pantry and the windows was a snap, and the short bits over the windows weren’t too bad, but papering under the cabinets is a beast. Naturally, the pattern repeat is off by about a half an inch, so there are lots of wasted bits to drive my thrifty German soul to distraction.

I am currently searching for slate blue curtains of some sort, which are remarkably hard to come by. The other color is a very pale beige and I haven’t decided if the background is white or cream or eggshell.

However, this is the part that I dread.  I easily own over fifty cookbooks, plus umpteen paperback leaflets, all of which must be unloaded and stacked – someplace. Most of them are vegetarian books, but some are vintage treasures – I have a book from Frigidaire, telling housewives how to use their new “electric icebox”, and books from both World Wars, with recipes for stretching meats and other rationed items. My grandmother could have fed Coxey’s Army with a pound of ground beef and a handful of oatmeal; I have the recipe.  You want to make Junket pudding? I have a recipe for that. I can remember my mom making us “Bags of Gold” – cubes of cheese wrapped in biscuit dough and simmered in canned tomatoes. Cheap and quick.

For a gal who enjoys cooking, and loves history, this is my inheritance.

Wish me luck!

Every trip into the living room means a trip out of the living room. So why is the rug between the living room and the dining room always creeping toward the fireplace. You’d think the backwards and forwards would make it stand still. No such luck.