A Man's Truck

There is a man’s truck in the driveway. It’s a big suped-up electric blue Chevy. It’s got some kind of thing on the hood like the engine is so big it’s busting out of it like a heart busting out of a lovesick cartoon character’s chest. I expect to hear it go boing!

The driver of this truck is one of the boys who is in hot pursuit of Kelly. This one is making some headway because she hasn’t allowed any of the others to come over. I like her taste in men. She picks the ones who are nice. This character (that’s what Kurt calls them—characters) brings her gifts. When she mentioned she liked Sour Patch Kids, he came to school the next day and brought her two packages of the candy. Two. I thought, this kid means business.

When she mentioned she liked Miranda Lambert, he got tickets for the concert and didn’t protest when I said I would drive them, even though he drives. He offered to put down my mulch. And he wouldn’t take any money for moving my stall mats.

But he’s a man! I look at that truck and think my baby’s growing up.

The Big Reveal

The house is peeking out behind the corner, ready, at any minute, to step out and show itself like a child in the leaves who has given up and jumps up—Here I am! I am right here! I was here the whole time!

Every day it reveals itself more and more. Daffodils are popping up everywhere.

Trees I thought were dead, are blooming. There are flowering trees and flowering bushes. We tie orange baling twine around the trees that have white flowers so we don’t inadvertently chop down a tree that flowers when it’s not, when it looks like every other scrubby sapling that has gotten out of hand and sprouted up where it shouldn’t because no one loved this place for so long.

I have a weeping cherry. I like saying I have things. Trees. Flowers. A garden. My tomatoes. My blackberry bushes. My crocuses are coming up. Like a person could really own these things that come up out of the earth on the whim of the sun and the rain or someone’s decision to get out a hose and start sprinkling. Like you could own a child. Even though it’s your child, you don’t own it any more than you own the bud on the oak tree. But I still have them. They are mine. Children. Trees. Flowers.

I didn’t know it was a weeping cherry right outside my kitchen window when we bought this place but that’s what I was hoping it was when I was having my coffee in the wintertime and I noticed the drooping branches and the bark that was similar to my cherry trees back in Virginia. And now there are pink blossoms, so I think I was right.

Another one in front of the window has white blossoms on it but I’m not sure what that one is. The one I thought was a lilac, is not. I’m not sure what it’s going to be.

Like the flowers, bricks and stones and slate are popping up in the grass. We walk back and forth so much from the barn and the driveway to the house that we wore down a path on the lawn. We knew that one day we would have to buy some concrete, or pavers, something, to make a walkway. It’s very hard trying to keep your shoes clean when you have to go somewhere when you’re walking across the grass. Try tiptoeing across the grass in high heels when it’s raining. Okay, that’s a lie. I haven’t worn high heels in years. But what if I wanted to?

One day I noticed a brick in the dirt. A little flash of red. First one. Then another. Then a whole section about one foot square. I told Kelly to cool out her horse there. There’s nothing better for wearing down a path than walking your horse back and forth. Might as well utilize this horse power!

It wasn’t long before there were so many bricks showing that Kelly couldn’t stand it anymore and so she got out the shovel and started digging.

She uncovered a beautiful brick walkway. Now we don’t have to build one! It was there the whole time! And a nice one! Nice old bricks. I think about Mr. Apple laying those bricks, and all those years they were buried, covered with dirt and grass for so long that no one even remembered that they were there.

We found the original well. It’s in the basement. I can see it through a big hole in the brick wall that leads to the crawl space. The only reason I noticed it was because I was chasing a bird and he flew in there. (Don’t ask; that’s another story.) It’s about the size of a hot tub and is made out of yellow bricks in a staggered pattern like the Yellow Brick Road. Someday I’ll crawl in there and look inside. Not the well. The crawlspace. Well, maybe the well if I see something glittering inside. Maybe that’s where the treasure is.

We also discovered two automatic waterers on the property. I’m assuming they’re automatic waterers. That’s what they look like they’d be. But I don’t know for sure since I’ve never seen an automatic waterer in real life. I’ve only heard about them like I’ve heard about Haflingers. I’d probably recognize a Haflinger if I ran across one but I have no first-hand knowledge.

There are two of these contraptions; one in one field and the other on the other side. We found them when we were clearing brush. One of them is covered by a fiberglass dome. In the basin on top there is plumbing. If you tip it over, there is a round hole in the ground filled with water like the hole the sump pump is in. The other one is a rusty metal box and we haven’t been able to budge it. The real estate agent never said anything about these and of course we were not allowed to speak to the seller until after the closing when the coast was clear, evidently to prevent him from blurting out something he shouldn’t and causing us to not want to buy the place. But this plan backfired because there is nothing he could have said about it that would have made us ask for our deposit back. Everything that was bad about it, we already knew. In fact, if we had been allowed to talk to him and learned about the automatic waterers, like how we later learned just how much of a horse community this is, we might have paid more for the house. Automatic waterers was a selling point the real estate agent never mentioned.

And a danger. Luckily we stumbled upon them before a horse broke his leg stepping into the hole, or worse, someone’s toddler visiting us fell down it. Since we have no idea what we’ve really got on our hands, though I’m sure it’s something good even though it’s obviously going to require some work to get it up and running again, this will have to wait until we have more time. In the meantime, no small children will be allowed to run around unsupervised. Small children tend to crawl under things and hide inside things so they can pop out and say, Here I am! I am right here! I was here the whole time! Just like neglected houses that begin to reveal themselves when they are loved.

Why The Teal Will Never Work

It’s weird. I can’t make decisions like I used to. I used to make a split decision and then bam, next thing you know, we were heading out to Oklahoma to be cowboys. When the wind was blowing up my skirt a little too much, bam, next thing you know, we were in Virginia chopping wood and baking pies. When I wanted to go home, I thought nothing of the fact that the economy was in the sewer and it’s more expensive in Jersey and we had no jobs. Next thing you know, we were up here. (Well, not exactly that fast. It took a year to sell that house but once I made the decision, in the heat of the moment—wailing over my mother, kicking myself for getting shanghaied into buying that bad luck trailer from someone who I thought was my friend, sick to death of trying to make a living in a place where there were no people—I might as well have been gone.)

I used to make fun of my girlfriend who would go to the paint store and come back with eight quarts of various shades of white—cream, antique white, cloud, linen—and still not be able to decide which of the whites she should go with. I’d think, Com’on! It’s just paint! Paint it already!

With all the moving I’ve done, it was a good thing I could make decisions. I’d unwrap my pictures, get out the hammer and nails, eye up a spot, and nail it up. And that was that. There was no measuring, no standing back and scrutinizing it and taking it down and filling in the little hole with a dab of paint and then doing it again. No. I hammered that nail in with confidence and often confidence begets excellence. My pictures were always the right height, neither too far left nor too far right, and the perfect composition for the room I hung them in.

Nowadays, I’m stymied about where to hang my Wallace Nutting and I grapple with my decision on the rearing horses. I’ve bought a number of samples of paint for the living room, repainted one wall twice when I thought one of the samples would work but it didn’t, and still haven’t decided what I should do with the built-in cabinet. Should I paint it a color? What color? Should I just leave it white? Should I strip it?

I also don’t know what to do with my accessories. Do the insulators look good on that cabinet or should I put something else there? The blue Mason jars look nice but are they too kitcheny? What about the Texas stars? Are they too cowboy? Should I just do the whole living room over in monochromatic creams and browns like how it looked before I started unpacking all my things and it reminded me of the spread that’s in this month’s Country Living? But then I’d have to get rid of my cool lamps, one green, one turquoise….

I haven’t decided what color to paint the woodwork. The trim on the outside of the windows is brown and the trim on the inside of the windows is white. It should be one or the other, shouldn’t it? And what about curtains? All of my windows are bare. Even if I had the money for new curtains, I wouldn’t know what to buy. In the old days, I’d throw a bandana on the window and it would work. I’d pick something out of Linens & Things, eenie, meenie, miney, mo, and whatever I bought—lace panels, flowered swags, a simple valance—would look great.

I am frozen with indecision. You might say I have performance anxiety. Perhaps part of the reason I’m afraid to commit and buy some brown paint is because I don’t have any money and if I make a mistake, I blew it. Who knows when I’ll be getting a few bucks again? Maybe another reason is because I made so many mistakes, moving all over the country on a whim, thinking I could learn to make pies, thinking I could trust my new friend who told me she was giving me a great deal on a trailer and I better not pass it up, not thinking about what would happen if someone I loved back home got sick and I was so far away….

Now I’m older. There’s not much time left. If I don’t get this right, I may not have another chance.

So it’s much more important than it seems, whether the bookcases should be white or the bookcases should be brown. There’s a lot more riding on this than it appears.

What I decided for the living room:

Good Smells and Bad Smells

The laundry room smells like cows. Kelly has been meeting at a local dairy farm a couple of times a week to practice for a Future Farmers of America cow judging competition. She’s been learning what constitutes good cow conformation and the difference between a Jersey cow and a Holstein. The Jerseys have feminine heads. That’s what she told me. They must be the ones I see in the children’s books with the long eyelashes and cow bells around their necks. They are usually named Elsie.

Kelly wears big rubber boots when she goes to these meetings at the dairy farms and when she comes home, she is reeking. I don’t know what they do over there—roll around in the stuff? As soon as I walked into the laundry room last night, I said, “Oh, Kelly is back.” Even though she was nowhere in sight.

It would be hard to live near a dairy farm. They really stink. One time I was on line behind a lady in Shop-Rite and I knew she lived on a dairy farm because I could smell her. I wonder if they notice it, living right there? Still, I’d rather live next to a dairy farm than where I grew up in Jersey City where the air was thick with exhaust and the sickeningly sweet smell of the purple dye factory on the highway. Or by the fish factory in Port Monmouth. But I didn’t mind living near IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances) in Union Beach. When they’re running, the air smells like perfume. When I was a bartender at the Cambridge, the guys would come in and give me samples of White Diamonds and Polo in small, unmarked bottles with black plastic caps. Everybody smells good in Union Beach.

I purposely put my manure pile behind the barn so it wouldn’t bother the neighbors across the street. I don’t think they can smell it. I’ve already got someone coming to take it for his garden. I’m talking about a big garden. He’s a farmer. He came three times already and we use the tractor to scoop up the manure and dump it into the bed of his truck. It falls with a plop and overflows. If he hits a bump when he leaves, balls of manure bounce out and land in the driveway.

Someday I want to have a big garden. I’m curious to see how I do in New Jersey since the neighbors in Virginia were amazed at the bounty I had, being someone who comes from Jersey City where the exhaust is thick and the only yard was the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street. One time someone planted pansies in the grass. There were little popsicle sticks in the ground that said pansies in black Magic Marker; that’s how I knew what they were.

It wasn’t my mother. My mother couldn’t keep a philodendron going. You’d give her an Easter plant and she’d leave it in the purple foil on the windowsill until it died. Mrs. Pontius on the first floor must have planted them. She wore a dress like the nuns wore only it was a color and it had a pattern on it like checks or flowers, and an apron and clunky shoes. I’d go to the store for her. I’d knock on her door and say, “Mrs. Pontius, do you need anything from the store?” She’d give me a quarter for going. I’d always refuse it but she’d insist I take it, sometimes grabbing me and shoving it into my pocket herself and then slamming the door. Secretly, I was hoping she’d make me take it.

The rich people who lived in the single families up the street had pussywillows in their yards behind wrought-iron fences. They also had statues of the Virgin Mary under cement domes painted blue and white and stone birdbaths. I’d like to get some pussywillows someday. I also like hydrangeas. And geraniums. If it’s an old timey thing, I like it. Lilacs are my favorite. But they don’t make ‘em like they used to. When we had to tear out the old lilac bushes at the Jackson house because it was the only spot to put in the new septic tank, it broke my heart and Kurt went out and got me some new lilac bushes. But they weren’t the same. They were scrubby and there was no smell.

I was surprised there were no lilac bushes here at the yellow house because it’s an old farmhouse and that’s what those ladies planted back then. Actually, I was pretty disappointed. But I was wrong. There are two of them. The other day I saw the first purple flower. At first I thought it was a bird but when I looked closer, I saw tiny clusters of lilac cones! One is in the front yard and the other is right outside the kitchen window. I imagine what it will be like soon when all the flowers are blooming and I open that window!

It’s going to smell wonderful! It’s going to smell much better around here than how the laundry room smells now.

Hurry Up and Ride

I’m on a real time crunch because I’ve set myself the goal of riding by April. Actually April 1, but I’m not going to get specific because I’ve blown right by my target date. Let’s just say April.

I’m harried, trying to get as much of this house fixed up as possible before I start riding because once I start riding, I’ll be lucky if I have time to throw in a load of wash, never mind painting rooms, spackling holes in sheetrock, scraping, gutting, washing, and the endless opening up of boxes to look for things I suddenly remember I’m missing.

I don’t want to stop now. I’m on a roll. I got all the grout and the paint splatters scrubbed off the bathroom floor and now all we have to do in there is grout the tile around the tub. There are no curtains but there are no curtains on any of the windows except for Kelly’s room. Luckily the bathroom upstairs is windowless otherwise the neighbors would be getting an eyeful. This is where we’ll go if there’s a tornado. They say you should take cover in a room with no windows. I’ve never had a house that had a room with no windows. I was always worried about that. It used to make me mad when the guy on TV advised everyone to go into a windowless room or down into the basement. What if you didn’t have a basement or a windowless room? I’m glad I finally have one so I can comply with the news guy’s instructions. Of course there’s no room in there for people to hide. I don’t even have a place to put an extra roll of toilet paper. We’ll have to sit on each other’s laps. The Big Stupid, aka Motley the dog, will have to get in the shower. He’ll do it. He’s game for anything. And cats are willowy. They can squeeze in anywhere.

Anyway, ordinarily there would be no rush. Riding that is. Not fixing the house. I can’t stand living in a house that’s not fixed up. I’m not saying that it has to be all done. But it has to be painted and broken windows need to be fixed and it’s got to be clean. Especially the floors. Not just because we’re in the flooring business. In fact, being in the flooring business causes me to suffer with crappy floors even longer that I would have because the same thing is in effect that causes the shoemaker’s kids to have no shoes. I’m not sure what it is but the shoemaker’s kids run around barefoot and one time I lived with stick-on tiles that were supposed to look like black marble and were peeling up in the corners for a whole year.

One thing is Kurt won’t put down junk. He’s gotten good taste from installing so many nice floors over the years—wool carpet, solid hardwood, rugs that look like sisal but feel like cotton—that he won’t settle for less even though it means we could afford it sooner. But if there is someone’s else’s carpet in the house, that I don’t know where it’s been puked on, and it has been puked on because the chances are good that the people who lived in it prior had animals, especially if it’s a farmhouse like I usually buy, especially if you see the telltale signs of claw marks on the doors, I want it out ASAP. Even if it looks clean.

But now I feel rushed about riding too. Like riding is a quart of milk that’s going to expire if I don’t get out there soon and do it. Even though I still think of him as a colt, Harley just turned fifteen this year! He certainly doesn’t look or act like fifteen but let’s face it, he’s not a young whippersnapper anymore and neither am I. There are lots of people who ride into their sixties, seventies, even eighties. There are even senior citizens who barrel race. But I’ve had so many breaks from riding due to all the moving that it’s like I never rode at all and who starts barrel racing when she’s fifty-something? I’m not talking about trail riding here. Does one start running marathons when she’s fifty-something especially if she’s never even taken a walk before? I know it can be done. But it wouldn’t be easy.

Plus, after losing my mother I learned that you can lose anything in the blink of an eye. My horse. My health. The farm. Who knows? I have to get going while the going’s good. And so I’m on a painting frenzy. There’s no time to even wash out the brushes because maybe I’ll get fifteen minutes to paint again and so I stick them in a plastic bag sealed with a rubber band so I can grab them at any time and continue. If there’s only ten minutes, I hurry and get a hammer and nail and hang up a picture. If there’s only five minutes, I carry a box up to the attic bedroom. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

I know that you’re never done with your house. There’s always something to clean, beds to be made, dishes to be put away, laundry to be folded. But I hope, soon, that all the stuff we are doing because of just moving here will be done and I can just go out and live life like everyone else. Ride my horse. Run a set of barrels. At the least, I hope I have those nasty rugs out.

Decorating on a Dime

We did this with no money. Fixing, cleaning, decorating. I’m not saying that I picked things out of the garbage. Wait. That’s a lie. Yes, I did. Every time I go to the dump, I come back with something good. I’m kind of on the barter system down at the dump. I bring some garbage, I come back with a milk-glass hobnail vase. I bring some garbage, I come back with a glass candle holder. I bring some garbage, I come back with decorating magazines still in their plastic covers.

I’ve been trying out glass globes. The only thing that broke during all the moving was a glass globe that sat on the top part of my red antique lamp. It’s an odd size. Every time I go to the dump, I fling a couple of Hefty bags filled with kitty litter and coffee grounds, then I rifle through the pile of things the dump man put aside because he thought something was too good for the garbage and someone else might be able to use it. I find a glass globe that might work, take it home, try it, and when it doesn’t, I bring it back and trade it out for another one. One of these days I’m going to hit on the right one.

The dump man is cranky. Someone gave me a heads-up about that. He takes his job very seriously and you’re in big trouble if you try to sneak a Betty Crocker cake box into the regular garbage instead of putting it in the cardboard recyclables bin and he catches you. But that doesn’t worry me. I look at it as a challenge. Not just the recycling but the relationship. I get along great with grumpy old guys. Especially if they’re anal. Because let’s face it, I’m a little anal. I admire it that the dump man is out there with his broom directing people to the green glass bin and the brown glass bin and watching that someone doesn’t get his tin cans mixed up with his aluminum. Because if you’re not going to do a job right, why do it at all? And recycling is no joke. You should see those bins filled with the colored glass like boxes of jewels glimmering in the sunshine. It would be a shame if that was just thrown into the landfill with all the diapers and chicken bones instead of melted down and turned into new Mountain Dew bottles.

So I don’t mind him. I go out of my way to be friendly to him. We talk trash, him in his orange vest with the yellow tape on it, leaning on a broom, me all dolled up now because you can’t go anywhere in New Jersey unless you have makeup on, even the dump, leaning on my truck door. We discuss the characteristics of the globes I take home and the likelihood of the newest one fitting. We complain about taxes and the people who run the town who won’t let you put fluorescent bulbs into the dump. He tells me that I can sneak some of the wood that I’ve been cleaning up from my property into the regular garbage if he doesn’t see me, wink, wink. I think, someday I’m going to bring him cookies. You might call that a bribe. I call it a thank you. A bribe would be something you give to someone before the fact. That would be like if I gave him some cookies and then he looked the other way when I came with my truck filled to the brim with items on the violation list. But that’s not the way it went down.

It wasn’t only garbage that I availed myself of to get this place shaped up. I also charged a few things. I splurged and bought vintage wallpaper for the kitchen. It’s just the thing to bring back some of that old fashioned look someone stripped the place of back in the 70s when they thought replacing doors that had crystal knobs and porcelain sinks on legs was an improvement.

The olive green countertops had to go. Kurt is making a new counter out of sheets of laminate. He is actually fabricating the counter; not just buying a stock counter and cutting and installing it, which would be hard enough. He is going to glue sheets of laminate onto the old frame and make it himself. When Lowe’s refused to order the counter we wanted unless we paid them two hundred dollars for them to come out and measure, even though we assured them that Kurt measures for a living and even though we humored them by going home and measuring again because they insisted that Kurt’s measurements were wrong, and even though we agreed that we would be responsible and not Lowe’s if we made a mistake, they still wouldn’t let us order the counter unless we paid them to come out and measure. So we got our asses up. Now we’re making it ourselves. Visions of that show Renovation Disasters going through my head but screw them. We can do it! Thanks to them trying to squeeze another two hundred dollars out of us, we’re saving thousands of dollars.

We also got paint. We got spackle. We got faucets, door locks, weather stripping, fencing, gates, and new fluorescent bulbs. But we didn’t get a mortgage so if we’re maxed out on a credit card, we’re still ahead of the game.

I also got gifts. My girlfriends brought me things. This is the beauty of having good girlfriends. They know you and your quirky tastes. Micaela gave me this funky lamp.

Monica gave me this rooster.

I got this crystal candy dish from Jenise.

I have good friends, good family (a special thank you to my sister who went above and beyond the call of duty to help me with this place), and I didn’t even have to give them any cookies.

Lucky 13 Farm

Right from the beginning, we considered naming our new place Lucky 13 Farm. Kurt’s been wanting to get rid of the Smokin’ Bandits Ranch for a while now. I thought it was a clever name to come up with, being that we’re barrel racers and we smoke the competition. (Or at least we try!) Though young people, my own daughter included, wouldn’t get it since they’ve never seen that movie or have heard of Jackie Gleason or even Burt Reynolds.

eBay gave us a hard time about it. They refused to allow our name without a fight. They suspected we were selling illegal contraband—tobacco products—and I suspect they have people in India working the phones who don’t understand our vernacular and certainly not our jokes because it was like pulling teeth to get them to understand the smoke the competition thing. When they finally did give in, believe me, there was no appreciative chuckle.

Therefore, our farms have been nameless since the one in Oklahoma because we couldn’t think of anything better than Smokin’ Bandits Ranch and I’ve wondered if it was one of the reasons we’ve had bad luck at the places. It’s like having a baby and not getting it baptized. Or saying something bad is going to happen and not knocking wood, like You’re going to shoot your eye out with that BB gun, knock wood. But we couldn’t agree on anything. Kurt has been pushing for The Flying V Ranch for some time, but I think that’s too common. Flying this, Lazy that, Triple whatever. Blah, blah, blah. They’re all the same. Everybody’s got them. Granted, Lucky 13 is not unusual but at least it means something.

The yellow house sits on lot 13, block 13, plus the street address is 260. Thirteen plus thirteen equals 26. Just drop the zero! And let’s face it, we’re lucky that we got it. This was the first house we were interested in from the beginning, before we even put our house on the market in Virginia, but it was way out of our price range. Like a hundred grand out of our price range. I don’t even know how we found it—Kurt found it (he always finds good horses and good houses)—because the price put it out of our search criteria. Still, I inquired about it because I heard it was a buyer’s market and sellers were dropping their prices drastically. You never know.

The real estate agent was not encouraging. She said it had been on the market for a while but the seller wouldn’t drop a penny. Not a penny. She said it was a thorn in her side. All she does is take people there and he says no, no, no. Plus, there was water in the basement, behind the barn, and it needed a new septic tank. And the seller wouldn’t budge. Would not budge one iota.

We forgot about it and bought the winery house. Well, we didn’t actually forget about it—I thought about it from time to time—but we gave up on it. Then we lost the buyer for our house in Virginia and the seller of the winery house wouldn’t wait for us to find a new one. We weren’t looking for it, because we weren’t expecting the price to be lower, but when we found a new buyer, we stumbled upon the yellow house again, and lo and behold, the seller had dropped the price! The real estate agent was wrong! It was still out of our price range, but much closer. And it had a new septic tank! (This is a big ticket item in New Jersey; like thirty grand.) What luck!

And you know the rest of the story, how we got it and lost it and got it again. We’ve been very lucky. And so the lucky thirteen thing made sense.

The house was empty when we moved in but it was dirty. It had been either rented or vacant for thirty years. I’ve been here for three months and I’m just starting to get the smell out now. It smelled like a cellar. It was easier to clean, being empty, but I wish it had stuff in it.

I prefer to buy old houses that are filled with stuff. Even if I have to rent a Dumpster and get rid of it all, you never know what you’re going to find. In all the junk, there’s always a Roseville pot or an old violin or some funky lamps. In the Jackson house, I hit pay dirt. We not only found the hidden room with the coins, but the family of the deceased owner took what they wanted and left furniture, knick-knacks, and even this cool old picture.

One time we went to see an old house for sale that looked like the people just put their coffee cups down, stood up, left, and never came back. It was filled with furniture, pictures on the walls, clothes in the closets, and jars of blackberry jam in the pantry. A pair of eyeglasses sat on the arm of a naugahyde couch. An apron with green rickrack and a pocket to keep hankies or change for the milkman hung on a hook on the wall. The house needed a lot of work and there wasn’t quite enough land, but I didn’t care. I still wanted it, if only for the vintage wallpaper alone (grey with a white medallion in one parlor; tropical flowers—grey background, teal, burgundy—in the other) and the trunks upstairs crammed with linens, lace doilies and sepia-colored photographs as thick as cardboard. But when we went outside, I could smell the oil seeping up in the ground from the oil tank below. The land was polluted and we had to walk away. But I still think about that place all these years later.

There was nothing in this place because Mrs. Apple had been gone since the eighties and the guy I bought it from and the renters had picked it clean. But I did find a few things when I was cleaning. All lucky things. I found a chunk of Fool’s gold. I thought it was a plain old ordinary rock when I swept it up. What in the world was a piece of Fool’s gold doing just sitting on the floor in the corner all by itself? Okay, it’s not real gold but it’s gold! I found a Chinese fortune from a fortune cookie. It actually says something about cleaning and moving mountains. That’s me! Then I found a keychain with a little horseshoe on it stuck in one of the baseboards. Everyone knows horseshoes are lucky.

I also found a couple of other things. It seems that whatever I need, comes to me here. You might remember a few years ago I fished a wicker table out of the Dumpsters in Virginia using a strap with a hook on it that I got out of the back of the truck. The table was in great condition but, being wicker, the top is a little lumpy. So I keep a big atlas on the top of it and put my lamp on that. I’ve been wanting to get a piece of round glass for it. But now I don’t have to. The master bedroom was empty like the rest of the house. The only thing in there was a piece of round glass, exactly the size I needed, leaning in the corner like Santa Claus’s cane leaning in the corner in the house at the end of Miracle on 34th Street. Just waiting for me.

I also needed ice cube trays and couldn’t find them in any of the stores; not even Wal-Mart. Our refrigerator has an icemaker like most do nowadays but it’ll be a while before we can get to the plumbing. So I’ve been making ice for Kurt’s lunch box in plastic cups. Then I saw something blue sticking up out of the dirt in the backyard. Big expanse of green lawn and one little blue thing to catch my attention. Lo and behold, it was an ice cube tray!

One day, while walking across the front lawn making visual love to the house with my eyes, I found a wet dollar bill. Kurt said, “Now they’re throwing money at us here!”

I think we’re going to be successful here. I feel lucky.

And our luck has been good. Kurt found work subcontracting for flooring companies and we’ve been grateful for that. But our ultimate goal is to do our own work. We left Virginia on December 13, and we made our first sale on—guess—January 13. Then we made our second sale on—guess again—February 13. The first customer knocked on our door. Just knocked on our door and said, “I want to buy some carpet.” The second customer came from an ad in the newspaper that cost me six dollars. Six dollars!

Now all I have to do is break through that wall to get into the hidden room and find the real gold.