Marooned

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Hole up

My realtor sent me a note the other day confirming my worst fears...

"Checking in! So we're not having a whole lot of luck with the house. We've tried pushing buyers and other agents to it but no one is biting."

I felt lousy, but not too lousy. Most of the signs with houses for sale in my neighborhood up at the beginning of summer were still up. There were even a couple of new ones. The guy across the road who'd moved in early last fall, a "For Sale by Owner" tag had sprouted like a toadstool in his front yard one morning after a hard rain.

I have no idea why everyone is trying to get out of here.

That will be something to figure out since it's apparent I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

In addition to my house being kind of a dog, the realtor I signed with has decided to change companies. This is a pretty regular thing, not just with her, but with other realtors, too. At least, it seems that way to me. 

Meanwhile, my ex is getting closer to leaving Charleston. Originally, she planned to move by September, but now that's looking like October or November; after she and her fiance get a water line dug for their new place on his farm.

My youngest, as cheery a kid as I've ever met, can hardly wait. He's hoping for a tree house and space to roam. There is some of that here, but I'm not certain I have the necessary skills required to assemble a tree house that wouldn't end up maiming half the neighborhood kids.

Maybe I'll give that a shot, too.

The upshot of the realtor changing companies is that my house will be re-listed as first day. I guess that will mean my house will move to the top of the pile for people looking for a place to buy.

I'm not sure if that will do much.

She asked me about lowering the price, too, but I declined. That's really only feasible if she decides to waive her fees and commissions, the government gets OK about me not paying taxes and I embrace living in my car for a couple of months until I have enough for whatever deposits I have to make.

I'm not looking to get rich selling this place --that would be a nice surprise --I'm just looking to get out with some dignity.  

It's been a hard year, so far. It was a bitter winter, a tough spring and not a particularly good summer. I fear the season ahead will be more of the same.

So, we'll re-list and I'll keep following along with my gardening calendar. I'll put a little money aside for minor upgrades here and there to do as the work outside begins to slow. I'll buy firewood in case this winter is as cold as last year's and look through seed catalogs with thoughts of how I might do the whole damned green thumb thing better.


I can hold the line. I can be patient. It's easy when you don't have much of an alternative.

A hive for the buzzing bees

The wasps came down on top of my head, jabbing and digging into my flesh. I screamed and flailed like a budget table hamster at the pet store getting thrown in with the ball python. I slapped at my scalp, scooped up I don't know how many of the buzzing, flying needle bandits and cast them out like the little, black devils they were.

From the side of the house, to the front door, to the kitchen table all the way in the middle of the house, I screamed obscenities that would have added up to a sizable car payment if I kept a swear jar.

I do not keep a swear jar. That's just fucking ridiculous.

Sweating, head throbbing, both of the boys stared at me. The eldest laughed.

"What happened?"

"Fucking hornets, fucking wasps, God damned bees. I'll kill them. They are going to die." The top of my head throbbed. It hurt to blink. The words poured out of my mouth effortlessly.

The youngest gaped at me, eyes wide, jaw hanging slightly open. Me, swearing openly, is not a new thing. Me, holding my head and pledging murder while I uttered every conceivable oath, however, was new and it was scary because I seemed to mean it.

I ran my hand through my hair, felt for the wound and there was a lump. Looking in the mirror, between the shafts of thinning hair, I saw the wound. No blood. It just hurt.

"Oh, I'm going to kill them. I'm going to kill them."

But not that day. Outside a gentle rain was falling. You can's spray a nest while it's raining. Don't ask me why? I'm sure it has to do with environmental concerns, the groundwater maybe, worries of killing the squirrels or something. I don't know, but that nest was safe.

The funny thing was is I'd seen the nest before --or so I'd been told.

"Sure, you told me not to worry about it," my girlfriend said.

I probably did.

Generally speaking, I'm a peaceful guy. When my girlfriend and I first started dating, I was reading a lot of Buddhist literature and one of the writers talked about avoiding unnecessary violence to other living things --even to things that annoyed you like insects.

Once, while sitting together, she'd spotted a spider, shrieked and pointed at it then demanded I get rid of it.

She'd meant kill it. Instead, I'd scooped it up in a napkin and taken it outside. She looked at me as if I'd lost my mind.

"Why did you do that?"

I explained and she wasn't impressed. I'd betrayed an important part of the social contract between men and women who are dating: I was supposed to kill things like spiders, just kill them; if necessary, with fire.

I still harbor a mostly live and let live sort of attitude.

A nest outside, if I'd seen it and not known for sure what kind of bees lived within, would I have said, "Oh, don't worry about it? They won't bother you if you don't bother them?"

Yeah, I would have done that.

Stupid hippie.

So, the unprovoked, Pearl Harbor-style attack on my head was my fault. I should have known better. I should have listened to early reconnaissance. I should have increased patrols in the Pacific or maybe, just maybe, I should have taken the nuclear option early, protected my own person by eliminating the threat beforehand.

I was lucky that the things just got me and not anyone else.

It took days to get the job done. First, it had to stop raining and the nest had to dry out. Second, I had to have the required $4.65 needed to buy a big, black can of bug spray --the more ecologically destructive the better.

As it happened, the wasps got an extra couple of days while I waited for a check to clear. I was broke. So, I spent at least three days just wishing and hating, which was sort of therapeutic.

Finally, when I had the money (or close enough as far as the grocery store was concerned), I stood from a safe distance and hosed the bleached paper orb down. Winged, black figures fell from the nest and plummeted silently to the ground and whatever heavenly reward is reserved for such ugly, hateful things.

I imagine they get to go to hell.

Summer Bummer

It's been largely quiet the past couple of weeks. The blogging has slacked off because my radio show launched and not much has happened since the one car slowed down to look at the sign in my front yard a few weeks back.

I'm starting to think I just got in too late. I waited too long and most of the people who were going to buy this summer have already started the tedious, yet soul-crushing process of dealing with the banks.

Still, I hear the Chinese are buying up property in the U.S. Maybe I can talk my realtor into sending some brochures to Beijing. They could put an embassy here or maybe a prison work camp. Whatever works. I'm sure the county commission would be happy to have them. 

I also got my lawnmower back, but I'm sick of yard work. I'm sick of it and would be happy to pave the whole damned thing and turn the backyard into a trailer park, if I just had the money.

Money is the new, old worry. My mortgage went up in July. This happens, apparently. Taxes go up. The value of property goes up, which means taxes go up some more. Then there's insurance which probably goes up with the increase in value, inflation or just because Jesus said so.

I have no idea what the reason is. I got a note about it a couple of months ago, warning me it was coming, explaining in detail why this was happening and how I could avert it by simply giving them the money up front.

I didn't study the reasons, I just looked at the number and said, "Fuck, like I need this."

When they raised the monthly two years ago, I had the money. I paid it and that felt good. This time around, there is no extra money. I stay in a perpetual state of tension. There's barely enough just to get by, let alone take a handful of well-earned days to just relax.



I can hardly stand to look at all the pictures of people on vacation this summer. You see them on Facebook. Old friends who are in France and not for the first time, guys I knew in college taking their kids to Italy and vague acquaintances headed like lemmings to the ocean.


Envy is unbecoming in someone who has been so very much blessed, who has been given so many wonderful things, and I am so grateful for what I have, but I am envious and it makes my heart bitter.

Just not bitter enough to start going to Tea Party rallies. Those fools are crazy.

So, the new normal is to pay $60 more a month, raising my mortgage it to $750 a month, which well-meaning friends tell me is the going rate for a decent two-bedroom apartment in Charleston --at least in the parts where you don't have to worry too much about getting stuck in the ribs with a sharpened screwdriver.

That's what they tell me. For what I have, I'm getting a bargain they say.

"Plus you've got all that land."


They're probably right. This is what everybody wants. This is paradise.

Sounds of silence

I got the mower back just before the 4th. The hardware store fixed the carburetor and then went ahead and was good enough to do a full tune-up, sharpen the blade and polish the thing for another 30 bucks.

I didn't argue, but I didn't order it, either.

I spent most of the holiday mowing the lawn, listening to old Beatles records on my iPod and waiting for the knee-high grass to choke the mower to a stop, but it didn't happen. I got through in just five hours, which was about normal, even when the grass isn't deep and full of terrors.

I hadn't ordered the tune up or the sharpened blade for 30 bucks, but I had sure as hell needed it. 

I was glad to get it done. For the last couple of weeks, I'd been trimming bushes, picking up debris and cutting back the honeysuckle vine strangling some as yet to be identified fruit tree out back (It looks kind of like an Asian pear, but I refuse to actually eat one).

The mowing was a relief. Without it, I doubt anyone would have even given the place even a second look --not that people are showing up much. I'm still hoping for the woman in that beater Honda to come back, possibly with her meth-making, hillbilly boyfriend or collection of dangerous pitbulls.

I'm not picky, but nobody has come by.

After the mowing, the showering and conscious re-hydrating, we cooked out on the patio. I'm getting better at grilling. The chicken turned out a little dry, but not charred like last month's steaks.

My girlfriend and I, we sat in chairs, read for a while and just soaked in the quiet.

That's something Cavendar Drive has going for it: quiet.

It's not a perfect quiet. There are always the birds, the frogs and the crickets. Sometimes there are other things I'm not well-versed enough to identify --probably velociraptors, mutant rabbits, maybe unicorns or werewolf Republicans. In the distance, you can hear the road. Every now and again, a plane flies too low on its way to the airport. In the summer, we have mowers chewing yards, chainsaws whining as they slice through dead wood. In the fall, it's the far away report of hunting rifles echoing from high up in the hills somewhere.

That sound in particular reminds me of home. It reminds me of damp, misty autumn in Pearisburg, Virginia and being told to go outside because I'd become a pain-in-the-ass some Saturday morning.

I was regularly a pain-in-the-ass.

As I boy, I remembered wondering about who was up in those hills and what they were hunting. Either way or on either side, I was glad I wasn't up there. In the same way that they say golf is a good walk spoiled, hunting has never appealed to me either.

The quiet here was something I had to get used to. Before moving to Pinch, I'd grown accustom to city noise --or Charleston's version of it, which is not like the noise of an actual city (We're more of a good sized town). I'd gotten used to hearing the neighbor's television or the stray argument. I'd been painfully aware of the disturbances in my own home --did I snore too loud? If I could hear them, could they hear me?

I haven't had to worry about noise out in the semi-country. I close the door, close the window and the inside of the house is as quiet as a tomb. I can play my stereo as loud as I want and nobody is going to care --of course, I just have the iPod and a dinky MP3 player docking station. I don't even have a record player.

There's something to be said for peace and quiet. 

Sometimes I wonder how I'll adapt to living in the city again, if I'll miss all this bucolic bliss and rural peace and quiet --and then I remember the damned lawn.

updates

When I first started talking about selling the place, the realtor asked me if I'd done any updates? Had I painted, pulled up carpet or replaced anything? Had I extracted the aging, battle-tested appliances and plugged in newer, shinier models like the ones usually found in the pages of a Sears Catalog?

No.

I hadn't done a damned thing. Oh sure, there'd  been vague plans --after I won the lottery, got a book deal, was involved in a class action lawsuit against a soft drink bottler. Sure, then maybe I'd have got a nice, polished steel refrigerator with a built-in ice cream maker and mixed drink blender.

Back when I was looking into selling the place, I'd researched updates, but the numbers didn't work out for most of them --like replacing appliances. Everything I read said you'd maybe get back 3/4 what you paid out for a new stove or dishwasher.

Spending money to lose money, and I can't afford to lose anything, but after talking it over with the realtor, I did agree to pull up the vintage 1970 orange marmalade-colored shag carpet. Removing something that I didn't have to replace seemed well within my skill set.

Basically. Well, not really. I had no idea what I was doing. Comfortably, I can change my oil and change a tire --which aren't things you typically need to do to a house, but I looked it up online and watched the video twice. Then I went out, bought a crowbar, and tried to watch "Bates Motel" on Netflix as I followed the directions of the video I'd seen.

It was a lot harder than I thought. With pliers in hand and Norman Bates (played by the kid from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory") gingerly edging toward madness, I yanked and tugged and worked up a dirty sweat before eventually coming to the realization that maybe I'd missed something.

The video I'd watched hadn't really pointed out removing the baseboards, just the trim. The carpet was tacked very neatly, and very tightly, under the baseboards. In fact, the method the carpet installer from the age of disco had used varied considerably from the way I'd been shown on Youtube.

Anyway, I got through a couple of episodes of the adventures of Norman Bates and I don't know how many plot points involving drug farms and sex slaves before I worked out what I had to do on my own.

Getting up close and personal with something that had been walked on and God knows what else for a couple of decades was enlightening. The carpet stank. It reeked and I was a little offended. I vacuumed a couple of times a week and I'd bought a carpet cleaner over a year ago, which was used regularly. All the work, all the dog hair I'd pulled up, none of that mattered.

But I rolled the thing up, lugged it out the front door, had a beer, and watched more Netflix before calling it quits around midnight.

I woke up with a terrible headache the next day. I felt terrible: dizzy and weak. I went back to bed, but couldn't sleep. Lying on my back, I couldn't breathe. On my stomach, my head throbbed. My heart sounded weird and loud in my ears, felt like it was going to pop out of my chest. All I could do was shiver and sweat beneath a cocoon of blankets and quilts.

I felt like death.

I gobbled aspirin like breath mints, sipped water and spent the day delirious and terrified until my fever broke in the middle of the afternoon. I drifted in and out of a restless sleep and finally fell well enough to get up after dark.


It days for me to shake it completely off and for a little while I tried to blame the sudden illness on the flu or a bug, but then no one around me got sick --it was just me. I'd gotten a big, fat dose of mold or bacteria or something else trapped for 40 years.


Luckily, cleaning out the fridge turned out to be a lot easier.

Dog days

There hasn't been much of a change in the last few days: Nobody has stopped by. I haven't heard anything from the realtor, either, which is fine. I'm still cleaning up and throwing things out. With the mower out of commission, the yard doesn't look all that great either.

Everybody has been very encouraging.

"My parents have had their house up since April. They've only had like two people come look at it."

"It took two years for us to sell our house."

"I just gave up. I think I'll probably die there."

The competition around Pinch is fierce. I counted no less than a dozen signs advertising different houses for sale by different realtors. One or two people have forgone professional help and have slapped up a $2 "House for Sale" sign they got from the hardware store.

I don't know how many people have quietly listed their places on Craigslist, through the trading paper or have posted Polaroids in gas station restrooms with phone numbers --it could be twice that many.

I keep telling myself it's too early to get discouraged, it's too soon to feel rejected. I have to be patient. I am patient. It's one of the few virtues I think I have --I know how to wait.

I have to wonder why everyone is leaving town, though.

As far as places go, Pinch is quiet, though I think it's like a lot of small towns --graying and thinning out. When I first took my kid to cub scouts, the thing that really stood out were the number of older parents who'd brought kids to the meeting. There were an awful lot of 6 and 7-year-olds living with their grandparents or their great-aunt because their Mom and Dad were doing three or four years for running a meth lab.

A couple of blocks over, there's a retired truck driver trying to raise a grandson. I met him a few weeks after I moved into the house --a nice enough fella, who drove around in a big truck and every once in a while went out to ride motorcycles with his nephew.

He was somewhere around 70-years-old and living alone when he got a call in the middle of the night from the sheriff.

"Donnie, you've got to come right now."

His son, he told me, was sitting in the back of one cruiser. His grandson, Terry, was in the next one.

"He told me I had to take him home right then," Donnie said.

"He was so little," the old man whispered, still horrified that his grandson had been placed in the back of locked police car.

And so Donnie took Terry home, as old as he was, and as inexperienced as he was with raising children.

"I spent my whole life working," he told me. "I didn't think I could handle this."

So, he reached out to a woman named Martha he'd met at church, an old widow who needed help with the mortgage and was struggling in her later years. She took them in, gave the boy a room and had been like a grandmother to him.

They'd constructed a family of a sort.

"No sex," Donnie told me one weekend, after he'd accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior --a last minute conversion if ever I heard one.

"We tried, you know?" He told me, while we watched a fishing show, one rainy afternoon in his living room. The boys were in the back playing a video game. "I couldn't satisfy her and she couldn't satisfy me." He shrugged. "Nothing we could do. I ain't what she wants and she ain't what I want, but that's alright. We do alright. We ain't in love, but we make this work."

Martha just shrugged and smiled her big, artificial smile.

"Don't mind him," she said. "He's been like that since he got baptized."

They lived together. She had her room and he slept in a recliner in the living room, probably.

I saw them more when I first moved there and less since. A little over a year ago, I met Donnie's son and then Terry's mom.

They arrived separately and did not travel together, as far as I could tell.

They seemed like nice people, asked me if their son had been any trouble and said I should call if ever Terry was a bother. I could call Martha. She'd send somebody down.

I lied and said he was never trouble, but I meant it when I told them, "He's welcome here."


I can't remember the last time I saw any of them --since last Fall maybe, at least Christmas. I haven't seen Donnie's truck and there have been none of Martha's grand kids walking around looking for Terry, who sometimes wanders off when he takes a notion to.

Maybe they moved on, too.