logo

And There Were Treasures

by | Jul 15, 2019 | Family, House rehab, Humor

You may know that I have helped rehabilitate several sad houses. My sister and I work together sometimes, and other times I help out my husband, the construction genius.

We have bought some forlorn houses together and given them new life. It feels good. Most of the time.

But buying an old house is a little like the first vacation you took together after you get married: you’re not really sure what you’ll discover.

Photo by Tania Melnyczuk on Unsplash

I’m not going to tell you about our first vacation together. It wasn’t as wild as this story.

The house was a foreclosure followed by an eviction – the ugly kind of eviction where a crew entered a packed house and emptied it.

The crew was instructed to remove everything from the house and deposit it in the garage. They left the garage door open, which was a signal in the city to come and take whatever you want.

This house isn’t in the city. It’s in a small town that’s pretty honest. Nobody took anything. Lucky them.

For six months, nobody touched that stuff in the garage. When we bought the house, we got the garage contents, too. Yippee.

The garage was literally (and I am using this word properly) full, floor to ceiling, front to back: overstuffed. We didn’t know what we’d find in there. Treasures, we hoped. Maybe expensive gems? Antiques?

We didn’t really hope for that. We assumed the eviction crew would have pocketed the good stuff.

Still, we needed to get the garage emptied out. So we started tunneling.

We found an end table with a broken leg. We found a brand-new starter that my husband nabbed. We found an old trunk that went to our daughter-in-law.
Some of the kids got to help. Under protest. They called themselves servants. We called it paying off their room and board and clothes. No digging in the garage, no birthday cake. That kind of enticement.

We were on an archeological dig but without the little brushes and shaker screens. We found the obligatory metal bed frame. Those seem to be left in every garage we’ve ever acquired.

We uncovered an old wedding album and a big envelope of x-rays. I might have an imagination, but I couldn’t make that up.

As the kids dug toward the back of the garage, they picked up a scent.

“Maybe it’s a body,” said our son. He’s always hopeful for creative bloodshed.

His sister wasn’t intimidated. “I hope it’s on your side of the garage,” she said.

They tossed aside more trash and kept digging deeper into the garage. “Think we can get this finished today?” I asked. I’m about using conscripted help for all they’re worth.

They ignored me, but they did keep excavating.

The smell morphed from a faint scent to a definite stink. When it crossed over from stink to stench, the kids bailed.

“Your turn,” said our daughter. “You said you wanted to get done today.” Kids are so good at throwing your words back in your face.

I could say I took a deep breath and started in, but I didn’t. Would you take a deep breath with that stench? Me, neither.

I put on a mask and gloves and goggles. I pulled junk out of the way and discovered our treasure.

Some yo-yo (and I’m saying this in the nicest way) had pulled a frozen turkey out of the freezer at the eviction, wrapped it in a plastic bag, and dumped it in a trash can at the back of the garage. For six months.

Foolishly, I compared buying an old house to going on your first vacation. It is nothing like that.

Buying an old house is like an excavation site with a tomb curse.

Sisters Don’t Always Get It

by | Jul 1, 2019 | Family, Humor

When Facebook added  Sibling Day to their long list of reasons to post on their social media site, I knew it was time to tell all.

You might imagine my siblings are cowering as though a bomb is about to drop near them. You don’t know my siblings. They are preparing their own bombs to send my way.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Today’s post will have to do with my sister. She’s eight years younger and my first impressions of her were not good. When she arrived home from the hospital after her birth, I was at school. All day, going through my classes, I imagined coming home to a cute, round-cheeked Gerber baby. Instead, there was this useless red little thing lying on my parents’ bed. What was this good for?

Ah, but I found out!

By the time she was four, I had the perfect subject for my experiments. Don’t be thinking needles in her ankles or any weird science. My method was aimed at making her smarter. More well-rounded. Better equipped.

It started with subliminal learning. I wanted to know if that stuff worked. Well, at four, my sister was the perfect subject because she fell asleep before I did. Plus, she knew next to nothing so any new learning would be obvious. And she was conveniently close by.

So, when she’d fall asleep, I’d whisper a fact to her over and over. I needed to find out if she learned while she slept. I chose a list of the order of the planets. Because everyone should know those, right?

To this day, she still knows the order of the planets. So do I, for that matter. She doesn’t thank me much for this amazing feat, though.

Subliminal learning worked so well that I started teaching her new words I was learning. Like the meaning of annihilate.

I heard it in history class and wanted her, too, to know the meaning of total obliteration.

She had nightmares after that.

Speaking of nightmares, when I had a literature class studying Edgar Allan Poe, I figured she ought to hear some of those stories. The Tell-Tale Heart, with the murdered heart pounding under the floorboards, kind of affected her. 

She didn’t care much for The Cask of Amontillado either. We didn’t use the term freaked out in those days, but you get the idea. 

She was five by then. You’d think she could handle it. As if I thought about how it would affect her.

The day came when she was not so open to being educated. Who’d figure that she’d like posters of Donnie Osmond over stories from the American Revolution? Pictures of cute boy singers began popping up on our bedroom walls.

And she got stubborn. We shared a room and one night I, in my great wisdom and older-sisterism, told her to shut off the light since her side of the bed was closer to the light switch. She refused. I offered practical advice like, “I’m not doing it.” She out and out refused.

And then she fell asleep. The choice was clear: sleep with the light on and win the argument. Or give in. I shut off the light.

She got defensive, too. I liked to call her sweet names like Squirt or Kidlet or Dork. One day I said, “You’re a Silly Willy.”

After all the educational nuggets I had shared with her, after all the intelligence I had groomed, after all the Edgar Allan Poe….. That girl reared back and glared at me. 

“Don’t call me names, you Big Ape.”

Get A Free Short Story!

Snag a copy of my newest story, Escape, and join my group of newsletter friends to receive the latest news, updates, and resources. I hate spam, too, and will never spam you or sell your email address. And you can unsubscribe at any time.

You have Successfully Subscribed!