My House is Up for Sale!

Do you have any idea how hard it is to hang two pairs of drapes all by yourself? It took me forever and an hour of working with a flashlight, a pair of twisters, tiny O-rings, toothpicks and the best outdoor glue on the planet. Did I mention the drapes were in the bedroom and parlor of my childhood dollhouse? On the spur of the moment I decided if I have half a chance of selling that house it was the ideal time to get it listed on Facebook’s Market Place---just before Christmas and when parents of a little girl might be looking for ways to entertain her during a pandemic and the long winter ahead. The house was built from plans that appeared in a magazine the year Gone with the Wind was a box office success. The porch looks vaguely like Tara from the movie but that’s where the similarity ended. Evidentially that movie inspired a lot dollhouse companies to put out southern style plantation houses. My mom bought my house used at The Salvation Army Store and I got it for Christmas circa 1947. I found the magazine article with the plans on a serendipitous trip to an antique mall in the '90s while looking for gas station advertisements in a magazine vendor's booth. Can you believe that!

Back in the ‘70s when every female over the age of 30 who was also an aficionado of all things Hobby Lobby were building dollhouses and shadowbox rooms, I did some extensive redecorating in my childhood dollhouse. I wallpapered, put down new flooring and built a ton of furniture from kits, made draperies and linens. My mom crocheted tiny bonnets for a coat rack and throw rugs for the floors and doilies for the living room. I also bought a lighting kit and woodwork to cover up the wiring but it never got installed because, well, that was about the time when I got distracted by more grown up things. (Use your imagination.) I also never got the outside siding hung and I’m glad I didn’t because over the years I’ve gotten sentimental over seeing the original stenciled shrubbery and shutters and I'm glad they didn't get covered over because they were exactly like the stencils in the magazine to help date the house. All but one stained glass window panes are still waiting to be installed. The brick that I did manage to put on the chimney and front porch got so sun faded since the remodel that they’ll have to be done over. Yes, I had to list my dollhouse as fixer upper.

I have lots of little great-grand nieces---three living in the same house---and I'd love to give the dollhouse to them but they are still toddlers and this is not a toddler kind of house. It’s still an option if I can’t sell the house on Facebook’s Market Place but it would be a pain to get it out to the boondocks two counties away where my great-grand nieces live because the dollhouse won’t fit in my car. (I think I just coined a new phrase---great-grand nieces. What do you call the children of your nephew’s son?) Whatever I end up doing with house, it was fun playing with it again as I sorted through all the accessories and supplies that go with it. I fell in love with the tiny light fixtures all over again, and it reminded me of a conversation where I tried to talk my brother into wiring the dollhouse since he was an electrician. If I wasn’t in a serious downsizing mode I could easily be inspired to do another makeover, the 2020 edition. But I am downsizing and I don't have the finger dexterity that I had back before time and my aging body left a lot of hobbies I used to enjoy behind in the dust. I even found a kit to make a wicker chair and table for the porch when I unpacked all the stuff. No way could my old fingers weave that furniture together!

On my real house I’m poking along on my ‘To Do’ list of things to do before I sell it. I just picked up two window screens from the window repair place. $52 spent because the dog loves to use those screens like a doorbell when he’s out on the deck. They were replaced twice before since the little bugger was adopted nearly 13 years ago. The newly replaced screens are not going up on the windows any time soon, just sayin. Back in the day when I had a house full of wooden framed screens I replaced the screens on fourteen windows all by myself and I’ll bet I didn’t pay $52 total. It was easy work with the right tool, not sure I could do my own screen replacements today.

Writing about Levi costing me money reminded me of a dog I had back when my husband was alive and first started plowing snow in the winters---this was before I learned how to plow and had my own truck. Don would often beg me and Jason the Macho Poodle to ride along to help keep him awake. Those two had a real bromance going on and Don didn’t like going anyway without that dog tagging along. For some crazy reason Don started a piggybank for Jason and would pay him a quarter every time he rode along when Don was, himself, earning money with his truck. And the dog would give quarters back to Don, taped in greeting cards on Father’s Day and his birthday. Me? Did he pay me to ride along? No…but Don did buy me breakfast in the mornings when we’d finish getting all the snow off the parking lots. My love for the Guy-Land Cafeteria goes way back to that era of my life in the ‘70s and I’m glad the local chain has a branch down near where I’ll be living this time next year. I'm hoping it will be my happy place to write like the one near-by as been for the past decade plus. ©  

Edit to add: The house sold with only a half day listing. And like real houses in today's market I could have had a bidding war if I had been smarter about it. Interest was very high---12 people wanted it in the first two hours---and I didn't know people made offers on Market Place listings. After I accepted the first offer of $125 someone else offered $150 but a deal is a deal so I turned down the latter offer in lieu of keeping my word. Two girls ages 8 and 12 will be getting it for Christmas and they are at a good age for it. Not so young that they'll break the fragile, tiny stuff. The couple who picked it up were excited, and full of ideas to redo the outside including adding brick pavers and real shutters. I was excited just listening to them. Woman said she was honored to have the house and will take good care of it and will send me photos when they get it done. It was surprisingly easy to let go of because I worried about it going to the right home and I think it did. The parents are going to order all the stuff needed for the renovations so after Christmas they can all work on shingling the roof, brick pavers and siding. I gave them a miniature miter saw to make their job easier. How coo is that!

Snow Plowing Memories at the Guy-Land Cafteria

When I drove up to the Guy-Land Cafeteria I thought I’d hit the jackpot. Parked out front was a line of snowplows, reminding me of all the years my husband’s crew did the same after a hard night behind the wheel. It was 11:30 in the morning so these guys were running very late. Most snowplow contracts state, “Plowing is done between midnight and 7:00 AM. The 2” trigger depth must be met by midnight to ensure service by 7:00 AM.” Some people don’t seem to read those contracts and they’ll be on the phone complaining at 6:00 if there’s an inch of snow on their driveway. The later the snow comes the bigger the chance that the plow drivers will be sitting in rush hour traffic not able to get around their route. That’s why they don’t promise/contract daytime plowing. That’s not to say they don’t plow in the daytime. They do, especially if there’s a major blizzard with no end in sight when they’ll plow around the clock. 

Snowplowing is a business that is extremely hard on human bodies and trucks. But there wasn’t a single aspect of plowing that Don didn’t like except maybe the lack of sleep. Even on the nights when we didn’t have to plow we were either up checking lots for that 2” trigger point or to tidying up the edges of our lots or cleaning up where a car or semi had been parked overnight. Even if there was no snow for several days in a row we couldn’t sleep because our days and nights got twisted around.

After going through the cafeteria line to put in my order and pay, I picked a table near the snowplowers hoping to hear about their night. I already knew they weren’t county or city plowers, but I wanted to know if they were they driveway plowers or commercial contractors like we were. Each class of plowers has a different kind of tale to tell. My favorite story is about playing what we called rat hockey. Once in a while a rat would venture out on a parking lot of a large multiplex movie theater where we had just freshly plowed and it was escorted across the lot with two or three trucks chasing him, turning our plows blades back and forth to make the rat fly across the icy surface. We’d “steal” the rat from each other when it was sliding to flick it again until he was at the edge of the lot and he’d run on top of a snow bank. As far as we could tell no rat ever got hurt but it’s a wonder none of us never collided. But the drivers at the Guy-Land cafeteria were driveway plowers who were more apt to tell stories about half naked woman standing in front of windows without the drapery pulled. 

I just got nicely settled at my table ready to relish the eavesdropping opportunity when the snowplowers left, a huge disappointment. If I was a gutsy person and I’d had more time I might have asked if I could do a ride-along sometime. People asked us that often enough to call it a ‘thing’ and I used to ball my husband out for letting strangers into his truck in the middle of the night. One guy in particular was a frequent ride-a-long. He slept in a dumpster at the movie theater and Don was a sucker for giving him a chance to warm up. Me? There were aspects of plowing that I liked but for the most part I wasn’t a fan of leaving a warm house to go out in the worst weather. Cold. Dark. At times dangerous. And I wouldn’t have worked for anyone else. I got privileges the other plowers never enjoyed. For example, I was never sent to the smaller lots we contracted because I didn’t want to be plowing alone. I stayed on the theater or mall where help was near-by if a hydraulic line broke or the bolts holding the cutting blade snapped. The guys could deal with this stuff but I’d call Don to fix my woes.

I plowed snow for seventeen years and even before that I was a ride-long on nights when they’d been plowing non-stop and Don needed a distraction to help keep him awake. It was on one of those nights when I ended up behind the wheel and I don’t mind saying I was a natural at it. I knew plow patterns and techniques from watching him, of course, but it also takes a certain amount of logic to do commercial lots because the conditions of the snow, the time of the day, the number of cars parked overnight, etc., all factored into to the plow patterns. Don always bragged that I was the best plower he’d ever had and he wasn’t puffing me up. I was good and I’d seen my share of guys who actually caused more work on the lots than they needed to do just by the way they went about things. People are usually surprised when I say I’ve lost my confidence driving in the winter and to that I say, “Give me a heavy pickup truck with a flashing yellow light on top and put me on the road in the middle of the night when few other drivers are out there and I’d get my confidence back.” 

Back in my day of plowing women snow plowers were extremely rare---I may have been the first in the city---and I used to love the expression on people’s faces when I’d climb out of my truck to go inside the Guy-Land Cafeteria with our crew. A woman plower doesn't even turn a head in this century. In 2018 a woman in town even won the annual snowplow rodeo. The crew I saw at the cafeteria? They had one woman and a half dozen guys, just like we had. ©

NOTE: Photo at the top is of Don and me in front of the smallest of three front-end loaders that we used to stack snow on the malls and theater where we plowed. We called them Poppa, Mamma and Baby.

Bombers, Dr. Zhivago and Icy Roads

I sign up for all the Life Enrichment lectures at the senior hall. This month’s lecture was given by a local woman, Sandra Warren, who wrote a book about her high school’s junior and senior classmates who bought a B-17 Bomber during WWII by selling $375,000 worth of War Bonds and they won the right to name and christen the airplane. It even flew into town for the ceremony and when “The Spirit of South High” flew off, it was never heard from again. Fast forward seven decades later when the alumni from the high school decided to research what happened to the bomber and the research lead them to another project: getting a marker placed in a field near the Meadows of Dan, Virginia, where the bomber crashed on a foggy night during a training exercise---two years after it was built. The bomber never made it to the war.

And I never made it to the lecture. I got up that morning, eager to go because it had been too long since I’d talked to another human being and I promised myself this winter I wouldn’t let the weather wimp me out from going places. I took a shower and told the dog to be a good boy as I walked out the door. I got two minutes from home on a trip that should have only taken another seven to get to the senior hall if I hadn’t been behind seven drivers going 20 in a 55 mile an hour zone. It was 23 degrees and everything was covered by a thin layer of ice. I had visions of someone getting impatient, and spinning out trying to pass, causing a chain reaction accident. Finding a safe place to turn off and head back home, I did just that. The icy landscape came with flash-backs to the days when I used to help my husband salt parking lots and we'd pass by lots of cars in ditches on black ice nights. Small cars like I drive now.

Long nights of plowing snow would often have me thinking about Doctor Zhivago. I had a cassette tape of the sound track from the movie that I played in the truck. Wikipedia says this about the storyline: “It is set in Russia between the years prior to World War I and the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, and is based on the 1957 Boris Pasternak novel by the same name.” It stared Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and I was in love with that movie back in the ‘60s. There are many snowy scenes in the three hour film but there is one in particular showing the interior of a house covered in white, icy snow. I had romanticized that scene to be the most beautiful winter-scape I’d ever seen. 

I had a chance to see Dr. Zhivago on television last week and was reminded of why I don’t like watching old movies. The interior scene I loved for so many years was not the sparkling crystal, romantic wonderland my mind’s eye had built it up to be. And Julie Christie’s acting was almost laughable, the director seemingly depending on close-ups of her pretty face to carry the story forward. And the Russian revolt, the fighting, the way people starved and fought to get enough fuel to heat their rooms in the unforgiving Russian winters was depressing and strangely seemed like a forecast of what could be coming to us if we don’t start doing a better job of protecting the earth's Breadbaskets from bio-terrorists and climate change deniers. I couldn’t believe the 1965 edition of myself could have loved that movie so much. I know I was naive back then when all I knew about the Russian Civil War came from Dr. Zhivago. Could I have believed that war and all the hardships that come with it would be worth it if only the “right side” wins? Or maybe I just had the hots for Omar Sharif. 

I’ve had Dr. Zhivago loaded on my Kindle for a couple of years, unread. It’s 700 pages long and after seeing the movie again, I doubt I’ll ever read it. The We Bought a Bomber book is 157 pages and I don’t have an interest in reading that either. From the reviews on Amazon, the bomber book sounds like it romanticizes the war effort on the home front which I suppose is to be expected---it was a uniquely all-in, all-for-one period of American history. It’s to be expected because it’s true what they say about the spoils of war going to the winners and that includes the winners get to tell the stories of glory and courage, of shared sacrifices and pride. ©