For the past several weeks, we’ve had a pair of deer traipsing up our driveway, sleeping under the mimosa, and picking crabapples from our neighbors’ trees. We think it’s a doe and her baby. This evening, we spotted the larger one in the backyard so I snuck outside to get a few shots. She crossed the pasture next door and vanished into the brush.
In the five years we’ve lived here, we have only seen the occasional deer and they would always sprint off. These two have been hanging around all summer, watching us, easing closer to us. I’m thrilled I was able to catch one before they decide to move on.
As some of you may know, we’ve been slowly — very slowly — moving into our new place for the past six months. It’s taken a lot of trips, and a lot of money, and there’s still the fence to put up and the porch to close in and the animals to move. This afternoon, we packed a few boxes and headed that way only to find the back door swinging in the breeze and the siding underneath knocked out.
They made off with most of the copper wiring and an auger that’d been sitting on the porch. The back door is so damaged it won’t even close, it’s being held shut with a bag of cement.
The cops were called and a report was made. We doubt we’ll hear back from them anytime soon.
They think it was someone we knew, someone familiar with the house. We think we know who’s responsible, but how does that help us now?
Next step is to see how much our insurance will cover, if they’ll cover anything at all.
Last night, our rocker bench got drunk. It’s the only explanation for why it dragged its sorry chipped ass across our back porch before throwing itself into the arms of a lounge chair. Sure, it was raining, but the hard stuff had blown over and the wind had calmed to a whisper. We heard it first, a knock on the back door then a crash and the sound of concrete screaming. Our first thought: The dogs tipped something over, or they were nosing around and nudging a chair along the wall. When we made it to the window, the bench was gone and the dogs were standing in the rain with wide eyes and ears raised.
Now, Cujo and Baby are big dogs — they carry almost 300 pounds between them — but there’s no way they did that. One, I’ve never known them to flip the furniture over, even though they could. Two, they couldn’t have flipped it other, pushed it against the wall, scrape it past the door, then flip it forward, up and over another chair without pulling a shit-ton of junk (cardboard boxes, a small trash can, their water bowl) along with it. Neither could the wind, for that matter. If the wind had been strong enough to pick it up and toss it, that would be one thing. But then we’d be talking about wind capable of lifting something that weighs more than I do yet leaves papers and cigarette butts and spindly tree branches behind.
The dogs were scared. We were paranoid. Stuff like this always happens when we start packing. Three houses and countless cases of furniture moving, pipes bursting, and photos vanishing from their frames. My mother blames it on gremlins she’s only read about. I blame it on ghosts I can see.
That, or the bench was drunk. I just hope the tread marks were worth it.
Cruising, looking at houses in the middle of the night. I’m sitting in the backseat to the left. My parents are arguing about where we’re going. All the houses we pass sit very close to the road and almost all are on sharp curves. I tell them the place we’re headed is flooded and trashed but they don’t hear me or don’t care. Once we arrive, it’s obvious there isn’t any electricity and we leave the doors open and light candles to see by. There is now an older couple with us.
We begin digging and making piles of stuff we want to take home. I grab a very old book and study it. It was originally published in 1815 but this printing is from 1821. The cover is clay or similar and embossed or etched with red details and a man’s portrait. Most pages have numbers handwritten in blue ink at the bottom and there are hastily scrawled notes in the margins. The book is in a dark red/maroon wrap made of either leather or soft canvas, about twice the size of the actual book, ties hanging from the right flap meant to keep it shut. I think the ties are too stiff to use without snapping. Someone had written on the wrap — more numbers, I think — but it’s long since worn away. I know that it’s worth at least $1,000 because I’m familiar with the first edition, so I carry it with me into the front room. The old man with us recognizes it and says that that copy wouldn’t go for less than $4,000 and that he would buy it off me right there before mentioning that it could be worth as much as $7,000. I turn him down and hold onto it until we leave.
— February 17, 2011
A couple things worth noting: This was at the height of my family’s Pawn Stars addiction, and (unrelated) I had become obsessed with finding my mother’s copy of Night Shift, convinced it was a first edition. I never was able to flush it out.
