Dear Reader, this handful of posts were started and never wrapped up. Ever since my head injury, my ability to write like I once had has been slow to return. I lost my rhythm and concentration, but I do feel it has finally returned. I have decided to publish them just the way they are, each separated by date, with no further editing.
August 29th, I accepted a job offer just a few hours before we signed on a rough fixer-upper house in Bradley, Maine. These are strange times indeed. We are living in a camper out back while we work on it. I have been at my job since November, had a head injury in February that set me back. With Labor Day approaching, I put in my two week notice. I have been struggling with the lights, screens, noise and interruptions. I can’t fake it to make it any longer. My concentration isn’t what it was. The culture there is great and it’s a terribly hard choice.
The lure of a home (okay, currently camper bathroom) office and flexibility was hard to resist. When I have a headache all night, I won’t have to drive into the morning sun with my infamous orange soup pot in the passenger seat.
I never thought we’d live in town, in sight of five houses and two stone-throws-away from a very busy route that wraps along the Penobscot River. The process was terrible. We looked at it on a Friday, made an offer Saturday, which was accepted Sunday, and we contacted the bank on Monday. It took eight weeks to close. Don’t use Rocket Mortgage.
Lacy white and blue checkered curtains and paneling reminiscent of a 1960’s single-wide. The bathroom sink is lavender and the tub is light blue. It has running water and a flushing toilet, which is better than the last two. Sad, I know. Yes, we choose to live like this. Most people wonder why we do. Sometimes we do too.
One quarter of the house is higher than the rest with weird steps leading up to the living room from the kitchen. Every window and door needs to be replaced. I’m not bothering with a deep cleaning like anyone would do as a first step. Instead, it’s demo. Carpets to be pulled. Paneling must go. An entire suspended ceiling throughout. Ew. Kevin took the week off to work on the house. Simon will be joining him tomorrow for a few days.
James stayed with us in the camper the first night. It was his first time seeing the place. Danny has absolutely no idea we bought a house. He has been inn Alaska with his father for a few weeks. He is in for a big surprise on Saturday when we pick him up at the airport.
Our second night a weasel visited my quail. I am selling them after much work to raise them and money invested. We need to focus on this house. They were in the very same ground pen they had used back in Bradford for weeks.
Ruby-Sue Walkabout seems to have really come out of her shell. I laid a towel over the top of a cooler so the dogs can watch traffic pass the window while we are out. She seems to like it. Her behavior is much different here. For the first time, she wants me to hold her and to sleep in the bed.
I miss Bradford and our tucked away Base Camp. All modern matching kitchen appliances, complete with a dishwasher and a washer-dryer combo unit and all the power we can use this time of year. It will be good to have a refuge to escape the traffic zipping along out front.
Red spruce are my favorite of all the trees. There are several mature ones surrounding the lot like giant hedges. After that, Tamarac of course, better known as hackmatack if you’re north of Bangor. There were strange trees that appeared to be in the pine family in Hawaii but I never walked up to properly identify one. Someone said they’s been planted there to make ship masts.
September 21st, a month later. I’m writing from Bradford, but as usual there are too many distractions to wrap up another post. The last few weeks have been a busy blur. I wrapped up my leave at W. S. Emerson and started at WKIT. I spent the last two weeks in historic downtown Bangor, in an office on the fourth floor. I used to take the city bus to Bangor when I had no car. James, then just four or five, would walk around with me. We would get something to split at Bagel Central, usually an eclair, and I would take just a nibble so he didn’t notice I was not eating. We were flat broke at the time. But that was okay, it makes you appreciate things later in life.
I told James recently, now a grown adult, about how once I pretended we were camping for weeks when we were in between apartments. I’d moved out of one apartment, given the new landlord literally all of our money, and couldn’t move into the new one because the tenant refused to leave. At least it was summer.
Now I’m parallel parking my new carsin front of one of those buildings I had looked up at. Life is funny.
October 8th, another trip to Bradford to escape suburban life. I was feeling a bit down yesterday after all the house chaos. Kevin came to join me in the evening, then left early to work from the camper back in Bradley.
Danny spent his summer away at a boys summer camp, a school-run band camp, then three weeks in Alaska with his father. Last weekend, and into the start of this week, his father took him to Lobster Lake. I have time with him in between, and we text and talk daily. I go to his cross country meets and pick him up from practice some. It’s nice to be only 10 minutes from his school now. I brought James to the last race.
James is thriving in college, and has made fast friends with his new roommate. His grades are high, and his mood seems to be much improved. Simon has his driver’s license exam on the 16th, he’s in his last year at the university now. They both have birthdays this month, 21 and 22 respectively.
The house process has been slow, and I admittedly haven’t done much with it myself. I sold the cabinets and stove on Facebook and have done some demo. The back two bedrooms are down to studs, with all the screws and nails removed to prepare for sheetrock.
All the leaves are starting to fall that didn’t already shrivel up and dry early for this summers’ drought. Colorful maple and birch leaves carpet the trail into camp with red, orange, and yellow leaves. I wish we had a road in here to make visiting camp in winter easier. Hauling a snowmobile and finding a place out of the way to park may be a challenge.
December 7th, in the Bradley house. Time keeps slipping by and none of my mini-entries turned into posts. I’ve decided to publish them all as is now, with the following brief update. We added a their dog, Opie. He is a five pound long-haired Chihuahua from a shelter who is super sweet and loves cuddles—until he doesn’t then is Devil Dog and bites. He came with a stuffed Llama toy. When he acts out, I bop him on the head with the llama and sternly say no. Given he has come to us with rear leg injuries, I can’t really give him a spank on the bottom—and using my hand to give him a gentle yet firm tap on his thick skull would be risking losing a finger—we “llamatize” him. It actually snaps him out of it every time. The llama has evolved it’s own character at this point. It’s only been a few days, and it’s a two-week foster agreement. We shall see.
Last week, the day after Thanksgiving, I injured my back by simply existing. I was packing holiday dinner leftovers into sandwich bags for Simon and his partner Tyler to bring up to the far north camp on Scopan Lake in the North Maine Woods. I bent half over to set the bags into a larger paper shopping bag, and a shooting pain just about killed me. I could not straighten back out and could barely hobble to the bedroom.
They went up to check on the place before another winter set in. The window Tyler repaired and the canoe we left outside were both in fine shape. They took measurements for replacing the roof at a later date, and grabbed a half-finished book I’d left behind The Curious Lives of Corpses by Mary Roach.
At least we have moved inside the house and I no longer need to climb up the end of the bed in the camper now. We moved in about a month ago now, when it began to freeze and the heater began to quit on most nights. We have one whole room nearly finished.
I was very disappointed over the wall mural I bought on Temu fell off the wall. I had to replace it with wallpaper from Wayfair, which I’ve had wonderful luck with in the old farmhouse kitchen. Sadly, whist sleeping, a strip of that too fell down and adhered to the side of my face and in my hair. Damn that peel-and-stick. I bought sizing to stick it up there better and enough rolls to finish the room—but then put my back out the day after they arrived. So, I’m at a standstill.
The rusty foul-smelling water was taken care of last week with a new filtration system. Kevin picked up the windows and trendy dark vinyl siding a couple days ago. It’s slowly all coming together. I have found three bedroom sets, a bathroom vanity, sinks, and an entire kitchen on Facebook Marketplace. Danny has done well to be helpful moving, installing, demo-ing and wiring the house with us. He gets off the bus here on Fridays now that we have moved inside.
I have a rather round house mouse that has eaten my house plants. I bought one at Blue Seal while I was there selling ads, it was eaten down to the nub. The next night it returned to eat the nub and root as well. It ate the bait from the trap without snapping it, and avoided the bait bags.
December 15th, still on this same post. My ability to write quickly is coming back now. I’m adding some photos and getting this up before any more time passes. Opie is doing well, though we have renamed him Lucifer due to his attitude. He has managed to bite everyone in the house by now. Danny took the longest to forgive him. It has been over a week since he left his mark on one of us, and there have been no signs of aggression since. Let’s hope that’s out of his system and he realizes he won the human lottery with this foster home.
