Not as Expected, as Expected

The work by the renovations people has proved to be just as not-as-expected as expected: Originally it was billed as being two solid days of effort by two people, but it has turned into a couple of hours here and a couple of hours there by one (fantastic) person over the course of three weeks so far, with absolutely no end in sight. I just hope the hours are being tracked accurately. It is extremely disruptive because, with the fantastic person coming in and going out as needed, I feel I have to hang around making sure no cat gets out, which puts a lot of activities out of reach, and it also has often entailed getting up earlier than preferred. But that is what I expected. I can see how couples end up getting divorced during a major remodel. This is a very tiny project overall and it’s still kind of a big pain.

Progress is slow, per erratic availability of person, but along with my fantastic new screen porch (latch still to be installed, lights still to be installed, and painting still to be done), the door to the laundry room has been installed, ditto one of the two storm doors, and several tiny life-improving things have been taken care of, like a latch on the door of the utility closet that means I don’t have to keep a chair in front of the door.

I attended a second online training, this one specifically about being a poll monitor, and I signed up for a handful of other trainings, including one to learn how to do phone banking.

Last Saturday I was going to go to an Indivisible online event, but Tom’s sister-in-law was in the general area to visit relatives, and invited me to join them for brunch in Albion, about an hour’s drive west of here. We went to Foundry Bakehouse and Deli, and then we went out to Tom’s sister-in-law’s sister’s place, ten acres where she lives with her husband, two children, a quantity of chickens, several rabbits, a cow, a steer, and a collection of dogs, including one indoor dog. The younger son took me and Tom’s sister-in-law on a tour of the property in sort of a golf cart? Quite enjoyable. We visited the rabbits and chickens and cow. This darling little boy said that when he gets bored, he goes outside and does some weeding. Right on. (I was struck by his obvious love for many of the animals, and the fact that he is also an enthusiastic hunter who regularly kills animals and probably periodically sees a steer slaughtered.)

Several astonishing stories about bats getting indoors were told, including one where someone sat on a bat and was promptly bitten on her hindquarters. Sliding backward, she broke the jaw of the bat, and then she pulped it so thoroughly with a baseball bat that there were not enough brains left to test for rabies. On another occasion, when a wife told her husband a bat had gotten indoors, he yelled, “A bat?!” and immediately closed and locked the door of the bedroom he was in, though he redeemed himself in due time by appearing with a gun.

Just once a bat got inside my childhood house in Ann Arbor. I recall my father peering into the slightly opened door of the study to assess the situation and then seeing that the bat had squeezed underneath the door and was on top of his foot, which startled him, but he didn’t shriek. I also remember my parents building a long and elaborate passageway out of cardboard boxes on account of a squirrel that was inside a chimney or had gotten inside a wall.

Last Sunday, my sister came over to help me move some furniture to get ready for my stuff to arrive from San Francisco, including putting two bookcases in the living room.

You read about older people saying that this is the happiest period of their life; they’ve acquired some life wisdom, including not to sweat the small stuff. I can’t say I am finding this to be true. Maybe it is all still grief, but the mood swings seem to be more sudden and more severe, which I secretly suspect is some sort of symptom of impending dementia, along with often being startled by what appears to be a large insect but turns out to be a pen: The beginning of hallucinations such as my mother had?

Though there actually was a large and ominous-looking insect on top of the bracket for the towel bar next to my bathroom sink a couple of evenings ago, which is to say about six inches from my eyeballs. A stinkbug! I recalled reading in The New Yorker a horrendous tale of someone’s stinkbug infestation, and so may have overreacted, though the internet does emphatically communicate that it is not good to upset a stinkbug, so I thought I should not do my usual thing of ushering the bug into a jar and dumping it into the bush outside the front door. This particular one was a Spined Soldier Bug, though I’m pretty sure I never saw any kind of stinkbug before. I was able to get it into the jar, and then into a two-gallon Ziploc bag, which I gently rolled up, so as not to squish the bug, but so as to ensure it could not escape. I secured the rolled-up ends of the bag with tape, and then I put the whole thing in the chest freezer in the garage, meaning to leave it there for three days; the internet said it can take as long as that for death to occur.

The next day, I polled my nearby associates. While the internet said seeing one stinkbug probably means there are hundreds where they can’t be seen, one of my contacts said one stinkbug probably does not indicate an infestation. She vacuums them up. (The internet says if you vacuum them up, you will have a horrible smell in your house, and they might not die, so you immediately have to take the bag out of the vacuum and put it in the freezer.) Another person said she does just put them in a jar, or scoop them into the butterfly net she happens to own, and fling them outdoors. By now I felt bad about freezing mine. I took the bag outside and cut it open and dumped the bug out, but it looked pretty dead. From now on, I’ll put them outside.

After having been on a even keel emotionally for a couple of months (it seems to me, and much appreciated), I woke up on Tuesday in a mental-emotional-physical crash. I texted my sister that I was feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by the responsibilities of taking care of the house and the yard. I said I had concluded that I am not going to be a gardener, after all: My knees, back and arthritic hands are indicating otherwise.

I felt kind of bad about it—she has done so much to help me, she shouldn’t also have to be the crisis prevention hotline. Also, I was aware that approximately ten percent of my motivation for texting her was to make her feel guilty for saddling me with this giant unwanted to-do list, since it was largely her encouragement that caused me to decide to buy this house. (I can really thank both my sisters, because it was the surprising behavior of the other, a day or two before closing day, that made me utterly determined to own a house I had been completely ambivalent about just a few days earlier.)

I generally think it’s good tell others how we are feeling, but I did at least refrain from texting every single person I know to say I felt miserable. My sister’s response was perfect. She said she was sorry I was in distress, and gently suggested that maybe I am overfunctioning; she noted that I have done a lot in a short time. And she reminded me that I don’t have to stay here!

I got back in bed, though the cats’ medication was due. A faint suicidal thought drifted through my mind: Maybe not today, but if this kind of thing is going to happen over and over, how much more can I take? Is it not inevitable that I will hurl myself off the bridge, if I can locate a suitable bridge? Finally I dragged myself out of bed and gave the cats their Prozac a couple of hours late and then various other things happened and that mood passed. I decided not to learn how to do phone banking and not to go to any of the other things I’d signed up for: I decided to do the absolute minimum for the time being. I even considered saying I will not be a poll monitor, after all, but it is highly likely that I will be perfectly able to do that by the time it rolls around.

I got out my calculator and determined that, if I were to visit San Francisco for two weeks quarterly, it would be entirely worth it to pay my rent there. A year’s rent is almost exactly what eight weeks of hotel stays would cost, so I am now planning to keep my apartment, after all, which feels like a relief—I’m still a Californian!—and I also don’t have to pack up all my stuff and arrange to have it moved here right away.

This means I will need to get a bicycle and a bed for here. Whereas the bike shop in San Francisco is two blocks from my apartment, the bike shop recommended by my friend here is miles away, so I will need a bike rack for the car. I obviously cannot hoist a bike to the roof of the car, so I consulted with a friend who said the thing to do is to have a trailer hitch installed on the car and get a bike rack where the bike will be at about knee level. This I can manage. I called the bike shop (Sic Transit) to see if they concurred with this plan; they did. I asked if they had any idea where I could have a hitch installed; they did: U-Haul does this! I have an appointment in the coming week. Once I have the hitch and the rack, I will go to Sic Transit to shop for a bicycle and accoutrements.

Regarding gardening, I am taking a gentle, ad hoc, disorganized approach. Each day I go out to visit my new plants; none has obviously died yet, though the leaves of one azalea look speckled in a way I’m not sure they’re supposed to. I check to see if they seem to need water (though I’m not quite sure if I’m supposed to let them get bone dry between waterings or keep them a little damp; I guess like everyone else, I err on the side of overwatering) and I give them good wishes and I look at them, seeing what I can notice: a long branch, the tallest point, a new leaf. One day one hydrangea tree looked noticeably droopy. I watered it well, and when I returned from doing errands a few hours later, it had perked up completely and looked fine again. That was gratifying. The other azalea seems to be doing very well. It has gorgeous deep pink blossoms on it. I have told it more than once that it’s my favorite plant in the whole yard. It’s so beautiful.

When I go outside, I bring my mother’s excellent snippers, a weeding tool and a bucket and maybe dig up some weeds and / or snip some lengths of ivy, of which I have a staggering amount. Of four general areas of the yard, corresponding to the four sides of the house, there is a lot of ivy in three of them, including going up a lot of trees, which is not good for the trees. For this amount of gardening, I don’t bother to put on my overalls. I might never wear them again.

Along with a generous amount of ivy, another thing I have is poison ivy, just one skein of it going up a hawthorn in the front yard. I have been reading about this online and have drafted a plan for getting rid of it and obtained some of the necessary supplies.

This morning there was a loud banging on the front door. When I opened my bedroom door, Duckworth shot in and took refuge underneath my camping cot. It was the surveyor. I had signed the proposal and mailed it back and then heard nothing, so I was getting ready to call them to see if we were going to schedule or what, so I was pretty surprised to see him. They don’t make appointments because they don’t need the person to be home; he was pounding on the door as a courtesy.

I went outside to tell him the things my father had said about the lot lines; he said any such intelligence is helpful. After an hour or so, he was gone, and I went outside to take a look. The lot is triangular, so there are three pins to mark the corners of the lot rather than four. Two were already there; I had never spotted them. They are obviously ancient. The surveyor installed a third pin, and also spray painted a pink triangle around sort of a large metal nail in the lawn extension not near any property line. I guess that is some sort of reference point that can be measured from.

I texted my plant-loving next-door neighbor to explain why there was now a stake in his front yard with a pink ribbon on it: That’s the lot line. The stake is right near the sidewalk. (My father did indeed, as I was sure he had, plant the forsythias so that they would be 99.9 percent in our own yard.) Trying to take a diplomatic tone, I said of course my neighbor is welcome to clip any branches that reach into his yard, but hopefully there will not be substantial removal of my forsythias beyond that. He has definitely crossed the lot line, but not by too much. There has not been any response so far. Usually he gets extremely upset immediately, so I’m not sure if he isn’t upset, or if he’s so beside himself that he can’t even text. (I told him he is very welcome to come over whenever he wants and examine the markers between his property and mine all along that line.) (But to be careful not to step on my plantitas nuevas.)

As for the line between my place and Digby’s, it’s also where my father said it was, though I realize that I had slightly misinterpreted what he said. He said the line was “at the utility pole,” which I took to mean the center of the utility pole, but it’s along the nearer (to us) edge of the utility pole. Sure enough, there is an ancient marker there, which might be an entire iron bar sunk into the ground. This is eight or ten inches farther away than Digby’s pin indicates, so I will be interested to see how these two conflicting data points are reconciled. In any event, the difference is not huge.

I have not seen any more dog poop over here, nor the dog itself, so installing a fence is not at the top of my to-do list at the moment. Hopefully Digby will get around to it.