In the Red

Regular readers might remember a story I wrote a few years back about my old, faithful 1977 Ford F-100 pickup truck that I reluctantly sold to my across-the-street neighbor in a panic, after holding on to it for almost 25 years.

Hardly a morning breaks where I do not catch the rusting, silver and red heap out of the corner of my eye as I survey the day from the porch of my house.

Those with keen memories may recall that I paid $4778.25 cents for the vehicle back when Elvis was wheezing his last few breaths. Now the truck spends a great deal of idle curbside repose as my neighbor, Skootch Johanson, keeps the rust at bay and adds his own little style flourishes to my old ride.

Since that transaction I have gone through an awful lot of vehicles, including only one actual brand-new car and a lot of used ones over the intervening years.

I have been thinking about buying a new vehicle for a few years now. Almost every day I have seen one I briefly consider: minis, maxis, hybrids, Japanese, Korean, German.

The whole situation boiled over my back burner last summer when, while on a family vacation, I rented a Ford Flex.

You have probably seen these on the road yourself: great window-covered shoe boxes with odd corrugated details. I liked the whole idea. It was a strange new ride, minimally advertised and seldom observed. I thought about it for a long time until one day when I should have been doing something else, I dropped in on the local Ford dealer. In the showroom I met a very young salesman in a sensible sport coat and tie. I described my interest in the Flex and we looked at a couple of samples. I was completely smitten. I thought and thought about it but couldn't quite pull the trigger. A new Flex costs ten times as much as the 1977 pick up of my undying nostalgia.

The young salesman poked around in his files for a used model that might better fit my budget but it was always the wrong color or not properly equipped.

At the end of each visit, I’d hear myself say:
"You will find it Steve, " – his name is Steve – "I trust you will, and in the mean time I'll come down and see you from time to time. Call me if you find what I want."

Meanwhile, deep in my subconscious, an idea was slowly forming. The Flex obsession didn't exactly lift, rather it sort of percolated on a back burner in my mind. Now and then I'd find myself driving by the dealership and I'd glance over the lots to see if there were any new Flexes in stock.

Occasionally, when I was supposed to be doing something else of pressing importance, I'd find myself in Steve's office shooting the breeze. We had nothing in common except my money, he wanted it and I couldn't think of a good reason to leave it in the bank.

The pages of the calendar peeled away and next thing I knew it was Summer, and the lure of the outdoors is upon me. The rooftops and side yards in our neck-of-the-woods are bubbling with the rhythmic noise of home improvement. Bang bang. Whir whir: usually while I am trying to catch up on sleep. We have had our annual argument/discussion/fantasy about renovating the garage and how it is full of just about anything except one of the four –count `em four – cars we park on the street for passing motorists to whack with shocking frequency.

“I am going to clean it out this summer, I swear!” I swore, simultaneously celebrating the tenth annual broken vow to clean the garage pageant. I also vowed, to myself this time, that I was really going to do it. I was going to put on a blindfold and empty every last crumb of crap out of the swayback structure and into the nearest landfill. So there.

How was I going to do that? I needed to buy a truck. That’s the idea! Stop the presses! Call Steve!

Nothing had ever appeared so clear to me. Within 24 hours I was sitting at Steve’s desk, signing a sheaf of papers and some guy with his name on his shirt was driving a brand new red pick-up truck up from New Jersey.

I picked her up by Thursday with a weekend off in front of me, a plastic bed liner behind me, I cruised the city, six-months of free Satellite radio filling the cab and the air-conditioner keeping things chilled.

I went to the dump a couple of times and bought some shingles for the carpenter to replace the rotten ones. I was pretty much glowing all over the place.

This may come as a surprise but, I will not share the price I paid for this truck. I realize if I keep this new one as long as I kept the old one, I’ll be close to 80 years-old and whatever they are selling then will have sticker price rivaling the price I paid for the freshly painted rickety house on rusty Hinge Road.

You know the house I mean, the one with the shiny, red truck out front.

Vroom! Vroom, suckers!

Fiddling on My Roof

(Dedicated to the memory of Franny the cat)

I am sitting here on my special bunker. There are the sounds of booms and bangs as the entire building shakes. Light streams into newly formed cracks in the walls and ancient dust and crumbs fall from above and onto the horizontal surfaces in my extra special hidey hole while a cat nervously purrs at my feet.

It is not Paris or Berlin, it is Rusty Hinge Road and I am having a new roof installed.

It all started a couple of years back when we were having a little work done on the house. Part of the work included a new skylight in the bathroom which included a new install on a tiny little roof. The carpenter, who I shall not be recommending upon request, boasted to me that “his skylights never leak,” which I believed, and also served as an omen for future leak problems and a disappearing contractor.
An associate of the same fellow, who I would recommend, in spite of never returning phone calls, , arrived in contractor #1’s stead and applied some goop around the skylight, the good news is he fixed the leak, the bad news is he noted other parts of my roof in mushy peril. Actually the skylight still leaks.

Thus began our search for a roofing contractor.

History and horror stories often indicate that roofing contractors are notoriously slimy. Even folks in the contracting business whom I trusted, wouldn’t offer me any names. So I resorted to the internet, finding a popularly advertised website that rates various local contractors. On it, after paying a fee, I located a company I’ll call “Choice Home Improvements.”

Their representative, Dino, answered the phone himself, made an inconvenient-to-him appointment, braved rush hour interstate traffic and arrived at our door at the agreed-upon time bearing samples and oversized ponce wheels, wearing a windbreaker emblazed with the embroidered company logo.

Dino’s jovial manner along with a scrap-book of awards and accreditations combined with photos of some of Choice’s choicer projects gave us a very warm and fuzzy glow of confidence. His estimate seemed fair. We liked him. The cat liked him.
We watched him as he loaded his samples into his truck. I was ready to write him a check right there, but cooler heads prevailed and we agreed to entertain other bids. So I called around. I asked friends and associates. I contacted trusted tradesmen. I collected a few bids, but none of them gave me the same comfortable confidence that Dino left at our kitchen table. He was firm about his timing, even promising to go over the periphery of the property with a magnet to pick up all the nails. His bid was the best.

So we made the deal and as I type this, a century of dormant house crumbs are bouncing off my keyboard.
He swore up and down that he’d be done in two days and that he’d be there on Tuesday. It rained, of course, so the crew arrived on Saturday – after a couple of perfect days. Meanwhile, I’d used up vacation days that I could have saved up for – well - vacation.

The Choice van emptied out like a clown car and soon the old creaky homestead was swaying under the weight of the handful of brawny roofers, prying and ripping. Soon, two layers of shingles were sliding down big blue sheets of plastic and making the yard look like the ninth ward.

Dino was confident that the whole project would be done in one day, and they were careful not to disturb the nest of robins who’d not asked first before setting up shop in the crosshatch of wires tethered to the corner of the west wing.

As night fell, the roof was not done, but I was assured that it was weather tight.

The forecast was iffy but I was promised an eight o’clock wakeup call Sunday morning.
A mercifully light rain had mocked us by moon light, and I anticipated a much more angry column by sunrise, but the clouds parted with dawn and the clown car arrived curbside. For once we beat the neighbors to the punch, firing up the gasoline powered compressor. Straight from the hymnal of the church of the Rusty Hinge.

By night fall the curbside dumpster was creaking under the weight of a century of roofing history. If you squinted, you couldn’t otherwise tell that there had been confusion, dismay and debris at our little corner of heaven. In their haste to get going, the crew left their magnetic nail picker-upper . So with the cat venturing out of the house after a weekend of being nervously confined to my office chair, I went over the battlefield with the left behind tool. I picked up hundreds of nails.
There is no DNA testing for steel, but by the looks of some of them, I sense that some may have been dropped at the turn of the last century.

The roof looks pretty good, at least from my view of the bunker, where I sit typing as I listen to what sounds like the gnawing of oversized rodents on the wall outside my window. The painters, working mostly in the afternoon, are preparing my house for a new coat of paint and me for a column for next month.

Alas, the sweet cat has departed this life for good, rest well my dear little friend.

Espirit d’accord

The Homemoaner’s holiday.

Bon jour! Recently, Melissa and I were lucky enough to connect ourselves to a to a tour group bound for Paris, France! As a public service to our readers, and with possible positive tax implications, I am using this column to dispel some myths and suggest some truths about Paris and Parisian culture.

MYTH #1: French Food is rich and delicious.

We love shopping, but since the dollar has no value at the moment, we chose to blow our budget on food. After all, we do, as our groaning bathroom scale will testify, like to eat, so where better to disregard our diets than in the countless bistros and restaurants of Paris?

An average block on a Paris street, Rue du Chapeau Hamborg for example, goes something like this: on the corner, a sidewalk café, next a patisserie (bakery) followed by a pied-à-terre and then an eyeglasses store. The next shop is usually an ethnic restaurant: Japanese, Senegalese, Thai , Moroccan, followed by a shop specializing in a product that is unclear and, unless you know the language (and we don’t), mysterious. Finally, back at the corner, another sidewalk café. Now and then, there is something called a “Tabac,” which is a place you go, not only to buy horrible French cigarettes, but virtually everything else necessary to survive in Paris: subway tickets, phone cards, tiny little cups of espresso, etc.

This layout means that you have a minimum of three dining opportunities on each block of the city. In order to complicate things, each dining establishment displays the bill of fare on a chalkboard propped up on the sidewalk. On the one hand, this makes it easy to scope out the individual restaurants, but on the other, not understanding the language, we often had to make our selections based on penmanship.

The results were often surprisingly disappointing. We had about twelve meals in restaurants and probably only three of them were even vaguely mind-altering. Yes the sauces were rich, the vegetables properly cooked, but the results often left us underwhelmed and on one occasion, exiled to the hotel room for a full day suffering from “Napoleon’s Revenge.”

MYTH # 2. All Parisian Women are Beautiful.

This is true. So are the men and the pets. The denizens of Paris all dress fabulously, never a hair out of place. We were there in still chilly March, and every living organism within the city limits, including houseplants, wore a scarf. Since I did not bring a scarf of my own, I tried to find a shop where a Parisian might purchase one. When in Rome, right? I could not, for any price, find a decent scarf. There were plenty of scarves for sale on the street, but most of them were manufactured, off shore, for the tourist trade. I never once saw a Parisian wearing a scarf that said “J’taime Paris.” Not once. Also: there are no fat people in Paris. I tried to find one but the only one I could find was in the mirror.

MYTH #3. The French Make Bad Cars

Here’s the thing. The French took a bad political hit a few years back. It got so we started renaming things like French Toast, “Freedom Toast,” (The French call it Toast.) I think we might learn a lot from the French when it comes to national pride. The French try not to buy non-French goods. This is nowhere more prevalent than on the streets of Paris. Peugeot. Renault. Citroën. These are brands that prevail on French bumpers. While they have Toyotas, Hondas, Nissans – even Fords – the French buy French and they also buy small. Gas is really expensive. There seemed to be endless models of tiny little cars that have no trouble dodging around confused tourists in crosswalks. Easily 85 percent of the cars in Paris are French made.

Even the subways, which are efficient, safe and run on rubber wheels, are of French design. Are they badly engineered? I can’t say, but maybe we could learn something. I’m just saying.

Final MYTH: The Parisians are Rude

I was ready for this, but a seasoned tourist told me to remember to say hello to everyone I meet. In the shop: Bon Jour! In the street: Bon Jour! Bump into someone: Pardon! Someone does something for you: Merci!

Storekeepers love money. Anyone’s money, but when the little bell rings over the door, the first thing they say is, Bon Jour. Not “may I help you?” If the first thing out of your mouth is “How much is this?,” you have broken a cultural expectation. It is so easy to be polite. I believe Parisians have gotten this rude reputation based on their reaction to rude tourists.

More than once we were helped by passing strangers who spoke far better English than our paltry French. As long as we said “Bon jour,” up front, and “Merci,” on the way out, all of the Parisians we met were helpful, friendly, scarf-wearing people.

Non, c’est le tourist, with their backward baseball caps and t-shirts that read “I’m With Stupid.” With their flip flops flapping, their cameras flashing and their voices raised on the principle that, louder is easier to understand, it is they who are rude. And it’s embarrassing. There I said it.

Like our trip to Paris, I have run out of time. Merci.

Combien d'argent? WOW!

Never Mind.

All this stuff about Tiger Woods - does any body, except his wife, kids, etc., care?
Infidelity, addiction, stupidity happens all the time. I am not condoning it, in fact I make a living off of the victims and perpetrators of all these things.

When a politician gets caught with his pants down, it is only important if it is a politician who has run his/her campaign on the moral highroad. All these gay-bashing latent homosexual a-holes should be held in complete contempt for their hypocrisy. Lawmakers who swoon with indignity when an opponent amasses additional, covert dry-cleaning expenses outside the matrimonial boudoirs, only to later admit to their own peccadilloes, should be skewered and roasted with sprigs of fresh rosemary and fed to brawling, inner-city pit bulls.

I am inclined to feel that a person's private life should be private even if their life is public. UNLESS their behavior is counter to their ability to do their job. OK?

I am not condoning this behavior I am just saying it is none of OUR business.

Now, as far as Tiger Woods is concerned this is how I feel: they could remove all golf courses, golf balls, golf channels, magazines, hats, shoes - whatever - It could all be gone tomorrow and the world would not be effected one iota. Even half an iota.

So, who cares?

In fact I just burned up way more caloreis writing this than neccesary.

Barberism

Prior to February 9, 1964, every American male got his haircut once a week. That was the day the Beatles made their American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. The lads from Liverpool with their long locks and lurid lyrics, plowed furrows through popular culture to the extent that, within a couple of years, even Richard Nixon had John Lennon sideburns. The era of the local barber shop had come to a close.

Until that day, there was at least one barber shop on every Main Street in every town. On the main street of my town I recall three barber shops with a minimum of three chairs and three barbers. There was always a wait for a chair and always a pile of ratty old magazines to read while waiting.

The barber called you over and, using only a pair of scissors and a comb, removed all superfluous hair from your collar line up. When he was done, he’d wet down what was left with a bottle of smelly green liquid, comb it into submission and in an hour or so your hair would have hardened up enough to skate upon. The young folks would be offered a lollipop from a big glass jar. Two weeks later: back in the chair.

I grew my hair long as soon as I was big enough to face down my father who, in spite of his own sideburns and mustache, was unbending when it came to how his sons appeared on the street . When I hit age 43, I decided it wasn’t worth fighting conformity, and I began getting regular haircuts again.

This is not as easy as it sounds because I am a purist. I am dead set against paying for frills like mousse, expander and tea tree fire-proofing or any of the other options offered at the modern “salon.” One by one, over the years, I have frequented the rapidly vanishing shops with striped poles by the door; places where the barber’s license is taped to the mirror and the long, tapered combs are kept in a jar of blue disinfectant.

Eventually, I started going to the local beauty school. There, for a really good price, they’d throw you at the mercy of student, who would very slowly, painfully and methodically cut each of your individual hairs, sometimes several times. Now and then, when a student seemed to get stuck, an instructor was called in. Soon, the two of them would be staring at the back of my head, the frustrated student being chided by the scissor-wielding instructor.

“How many times have I told you NOT to do it that way?” The instructor might ask, or worse, “how do you plan to fix that?”

Whatever happened while I was in the chair, eventually they peeled off the drop cloth, my pate lathered in fragrant, waxy goo, and with any luck there would be no major divots reflected back in my rearview mirror.

One of the benefits of risking my carefully-crafted public image to the sharp blades of an untrained and often pregnant beauty college student, is that a trainee might eventually become your permanent hair care coordinator. Such is the case with Helena.

Helena is an artist and has the gift of gab and a natural gift for hair styling. In her chair, I was regaled with tales and adventures of the local grim youth. She would unravel wonderful travelogues of vacations at Disneyworld with her husband, and occasionally whispering the latest beauty school gossip into my newly protruding ears.

After graduation, Helena brought her scissors over to “Salon Niçoise,” a well-established salon in a nearby town. I faithfully followed her. Every couple of months, I would call the reception desk and get my name on the schedule.

When I got my nursing license and began working, I quickly realized that, in spite of the rigorous training, a job, once obtained, is still a job. And once in the work place, one soon finds themselves ensconced in a situation that is full of co-workers. Us new kids, freshly scrubbed and altruistic, learn – day one – that for every skilled and competent professional at the workplace, there is the equivalent number of disgruntled, incompetent, lazy do-nothings that complain all day and find new ways to avoid working.

Such was the atmosphere in Helena’s new salon. From where I sat, it appeared that the other salon workers did not have nearly the dedicated work ethic and skill set that verily gleamed off the tips of Helena’s scissors as she toiled over my shoulder.
When I called last week she wasn’t there. “We haven’t seen her in a month,” the woman on the phone told me. Was she OK, I wondered? How am I going to find her? I didn’t know her last name or anything about her other than where she worked and that she liked the Monkees.

And now she was gone.

I considered sitting in the parking lot of the salon and waiting for a familiar face to emerge and then attempting to pry information out of her former co-workers. That seemed not bloody likely.

Hallelujah! A google search of the salon led me to their web site and soon I was directed to Facebook where I quickly located and “friended” her. Lo and behold, a couple of days later I was hearing a blow-by-blow description of the straw that broke the camel’s back at her former employer, and the story of why I was sitting on an old stool in her grandmother’s kitchen.

Sometimes, thankfully, a mullet is a fish.

Indoor Swimming Pool

When we recently had the house torn up and put back together, I saw it as sort of a maturation process. Until then, the old house on Rusty Hinge Road was a modified version of the previous owner’s decorating tastes. Sure, we painted and put up shelves when we first moved in, but when we redid the bathrooms to our own specifications, the house was officially ours.

This, in my mid-50s mind meant growth, which translated to Melissa and I needing to purge the pile of pointless pollution that we had collected over the decade. How did this happen? First, there was the doubling of debris when we merged our two households and second there is our mutual, almost pathological hording disorders, also known as “collecting.”

We had postcards, pots, paintings, empty plastic nut jars, brown paper bags, Clementine boxes, shoe boxes, shoes, hats, food processing equipment, sheets, sheets, towels and more towels, etc. and more etc.

Our initial thought was to get rid of a bunch of this junk, and regular readers might remember the under-attended tag sale we held last summer. In spite of our best intentions, most of the stuff stayed on the porch. We couldn’t even get the local roving bands of teenage punks and wise guys to steal the stuff. So, as prearranged, nothing went back into the house. It went into the big Volvo and off to Goodwill.

As a natural consequence to our recent bathroom renovations, Melissa and I discussed purchasing new towels. Grown-ups, it could be argued, had towels that “went” with the décor. Up until this discussion, we had a grouping of mismatched, leftover linens, selected from the mountain that had formed in the basement. I agreed to the new towel purchase, but had to include a clause about the aforementioned mountain of reject towels in the basement.

“We’ve got to get rid of some of the junk around here.” I said.

I knew that’d never happen. Now and then I vow to myself to open the Bilco door to the cellar, back up the big Volvo and fill the cargo bay with some of the stuff that waits, neatly folded and untouched for years, and lug it off somewhere.

Our new, Egyptian cotton towels arrived, and Melissa hung them on the towel bars in the master bath. They were luscious, soft and the right color. Very grown up. I don’t, in fact, remember every buying a towel in my life, but the old bathroom towels ended up in the stack with the others, down in the basement by the washer and dryer.

Then came the day, not long ago, when Melissa and I went to Costco to buy a rotisserie chicken, some mixed nuts and a skid of toilet paper. As we pushed our oversized cart down the aisle, Melissa noticed some towels on sale. Needless to say it was a fancy brand that I had never heard of, let’s say they were “Elite Deluxe” brand.

“Oooh, “cooed Melissa, “Elite Deluxe towels on for only $7.99! What a deal!”

Apparently if I had been up on my towels, I’d have been equally excited.

“Ain’t that a shame?” I said, “and we just got new towels!”

Melissa said, “Oh, you’re right, but that blue goes with our color scheme!”

A week later, while I was stuffing clothing into the washer I noticed two new blue towels on the stack. I would never have noticed but for the shiny, new “Elite Deluxe” tags still on their hems. My initial reaction was to flip my lid but I changed my mind. After all, who was I to throw stones in the basement of my glass house?

I set the washer load to “XL” and waited for the agitator to kick in. It’s been known to run and run and overflow and fill the basement. (Homemoaner, February 2008) The agitator kicked in and I went upstairs and got lost in the usual ongoing rigmarole that fills the hours between sleep. In a day or two, if the opportunity arose, I’d mention the new towels to Melissa.

One fine Saturday, it popped into my head during a debate. I was losing, so I casually mentioned the new “Elite Deluxe” towels. She was surprised that I noticed them, seeing as how there are so many old towels among which they were concealed. I didn’t win our debate, but it was close enough to a draw that we were soon sitting at our respective computers, busily whiling away the rainy day.

At some point Melissa went downstairs for a cup of tea or some cat-related medical emergency. A few minutes she was hollering and hooting so loudly, I thought she had fallen down the stairs.

As I rushed to her side, I realized the washing machine had overflowed. She’d put in the new towels, and in an effort to conserve water and assuage her guilt, pushed the “large load” button and forgot about it. “Large load” is notorious for causing floods and sure enough the water in the basement was more than ankle deep.

I said nothing to Melissa, no words would have made her feel any better or any worse. I turned on the pump, which is set up for just such an event, and in a couple of hours the water had been sucked out the window and into a convenient nearby street grate. We just swept the puddles across the floor and into the big hole in the floor where the pump is installed and moved the soggy cardboard boxes full of unnecessary junk up to higher ground.
Fortunately we had plenty of old towels around to soak up the last of the water.

Smug as a bug in a waterlogged rug.

Crock Plot

If we were to move, we’d have to have a two car garage and a fireplace. These are things we don’t have in our house on Rusty Hinge Road. So this is the criteria I use search the real estate web sites.

Recently a really interesting property popped up, so I called my old real estate buddy, Bryce. He was happy to get us in. In fact he’d bring along his significant other, Lily, and we make a day of it.

The property itself was an old creaky cape, not very photogenic, but cheap, and it had a two car garage with a rentable apartment - plus it was on 7.5 acres of land!

It had snowed that week and the weather had stayed chilly, so the ride up into the back country was lovely. Somewhere, as we chatted away, Bryce and Lily told us about their crock pot.

I think I can pin point when crock pots suddenly became such a huge part of our lives. It all started at our lazy, family Christmas in Vermont where my Sister, Barbara, and her husband, Charlie, non-chalantly pulled a vintage Rival two and a half quart out of the pantry and put together a beef barley stew right after a gut-busting country breakfast of butter-smeared pancakes drowned in Charlie’s own maple syrup and hickory smoked bacon from the smokehouse down on the highway. While Melissa, my son Alexander and I draped ourselves like wet mittens on comfortable chairs around the wood stove, Babbs and Chaz put dinner on, slow and low.

We thought nothing of it, eyes at half mast, intoxicated by the Green Mountain ambience, and would not have even been aware of their labors had the house not slowly began to fill with a delicious aroma that seeped out from around the heavy Pyrex lid, stimulating our appetite glands, making us quickly forget that after that huge non-Jenny Craig breakfast, we’d sworn off food for the duration.

No matter, Christmas night, we inhaled the sumptuous stew, mopping up the last rich, brown, dribblings with redundant slices of buttered bread.

So as we sank up to our elbows in the equally sumptuous leather upholstery of Bryce’s car, we were hearing wonderful tales of hearty stews, and fricasseed chickens, all prepared far in advance, spending the day simmering and filling the house with a wholesome, heady, heavenly bouquet. So, when you walk in the door – rode hard and hungry – dinner meets you at the door like the old family dog: kissing your face and filling your senses with love.

We could imagine just such a scenario as we arrived at the old creaky cape. Built in 1918, she boasted of a stone fireplace and wide-plank floors (gaps chinked with rope, of all things), two need-to-be-redone bathrooms, an unremarkable kitchen, several teeny tiny bedrooms, and a (real) wood paneled den. A total fixer-upper.

The apartment over the two-car garage definitely needed work. Most of the walls were painted shrill lilac and chartreuse.

Through the kitchen window of the apartment, right on the edge of the tree line, you could make out the unmistakable, weathered colors of barn board, put together in the form of some sort of shed. Against our realtor’s advice, we trudged through the ankle deep snow to inspect what would be, were we to go so far as to actually buy the place, a potential art studio/junk storage/source of kindling.

An “outbuilding” is on our wish list of any potential property we may, in our dreams and in the future, buy.

This particular out building grew more interesting as it came into focus over the field of snow. It appeared to have originally been some sort of tractor shed, judging by the two garage-style doors on the long side.

We wrestled the operating door open and when the low light streamed in, the four of us gasped in unison.

It felt as if we were the first people to set foot in the space in 30 years. A 72 inch Locke mower sat rusting, right where it had been parked the last time it had been run over the lawn. There were work benches wrapping around the space and multi-paned windows on three sides. There was a table saw and a radial arm saw and jars of nails and screws. There were old cracked fan belts and ancient, empty beer bottles and old wooden crates filled with darkened chunks of who-knows-what and cob webs.

In the center of it all: a pot-bellied stove. And rust: rust on everything. It was a man-cave on the brink of crumbling back into the soil. But it was also a place that a few replacement panes of glass and a few trips to the metal recycling center, could be transformed into a remarkable work space that Melissa and I could spend our dotage competing for.

We talked about making an offer. Bryce advised against it, citing “too much work,” and uttering my two least favorite words “tear down.”

In spite of the huge potential, the initial attraction to the property and the acreage, did not push us into a place that we could comfortably consider complicating our lives and our budgets for untold years to come. In spite of the possibility of income potential from the apartment and the romantic charm of the pot belly stove in the dilapidated shack, we decided it was much too far away from civilization so we passed on the property with a bit of reluctance.

We did, however, buy a shiny new crock pot. Now, our old house is full of the wonderful smell of winter.

Now we don’t have to get a dog. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net