A week ago tomorrow night, I arrived back in Vermont. A return undertaken, in part, to check out the situation here at the house, after three months of indications that D., the person taking care of the place did not seem to be, in fact, taking care of it. Some of what I encountered on getting home:
-- First impression: opening garage door to find the floor buried under layer upon layer of mud, slop and salt, a display like I had never before seen in a garage anywhere. Extreme enough that it stopped me and the friend who drove me home from the bus station in our tracks, leaving us staring, openmouthed, for an amazed moment.
-- A backpack left on the living room floor, partially filled. Near that, a big plastic bag full of plastic bags. All looking as if my arrival had interrupted someone packing, as if they'd ducked into a nearby dark room at the sound of my entrance, waiting quietly there to see if I might turn around and leave. The house lay empty and quiet, of course, no one about. Kind of eerie.
-- All clocks were an hour ahead (I'd left on October 29, daylight savings began on the 31st; D. -- living here for three months -- had never made the adjustment), except for the clocks in the two guestrooms, set to random times, and the clock in the laundry room which had simply stopped, its battery having died at some point during the preceding months.
-- Toast crumbs and coffee grounds, strewn all over the kitchen counter, coffee grounds surfacing after each cleaning during the next two days, having found their way into every available crack and seam.
-- Small, hard lumps of something cereal-like -- Grape Nuts, maybe -- scattered around the floor of the kitchen, dining room, living room. (Lovely to walk on in bare feet.) Then discovered numerous bowls in a cabinet studded with dried bits of same. The cutlery drawer yielded spoons similarly decorated along with knives bearing patches of dried peanut butter. Patches of grease were found all over the place, most impressively on a couple of saucepot lids, thickly spattered about in a way reminiscent of op art.
-- Perishable food left by me in the refrigerator three months earlier with the request to either use or dump in the compost was neither used nor composted, instead left to fester quietly, two or three items producing sizeable colonies of alien life forms. The enormous mass of mold found in a yogurt container looked like a nasty, antisocial muppet. (Next morning, I discovered that the act of removing and replacing the cover on the compost bin, four or five feet away from the rear stoop, had apparently been too much work for D. -- the solution: leave it uncovered, the compost inside freezing solid in the frigid weather, wiping out the composting process.)
-- Mail had been spread around the house, two or three piles each in three different locations. Mail I'd expected to be notified of -- Christmas communications from friends, an envelope from my insurance company dated early January clearly marked with words like IMPORTANT and DEADLINE -- were tucked away among magazines and junk mail.
-- Mousetraps around the house (live capture traps), apparently unchecked for quite some time, contained the bodies of five little critters who probably expired in slow, hungry fashion.
-- Everything in the stove room -- the stove being something D. apparently never came close to mastering -- lay covered with a film of ash and coal dust. The stove sat cold and dark, looking sad, neglected, unused.
-- The downstairs toilet turned out to be full of densely dirty water, as if someone had emptied a bucket or two of muddy, sandy slop into it, leaving the resulting ugly bowlful unflushed.
-- One end of the dining room felt inexplicably chilly. Next morning I discovered that D. had, at some point in the past opened that storm window and left it up, perhaps thinking it made accessing the feeder that hangs right outside easier -- converting that part of the space into a heat-loss portal, given the inner window's low-tech nature. Must have been like that for weeks, providing a bird hangout, resulting in a huge, sprawling mound of sunflower seed shells and bird poop.
-- While checking out that last bit, I noticed the ceramic birdbath just off the corner of the house -- intact when I left, now sporting a huge gaping hole. Looking like someone had dropped a major rock through it. That, after everything else -- and there are many strange details not listed here -- got me smiling, because on one hand, D'OH!, and the other, big deal. Most of this stuff, taken one item at a time, is small, goofy, strange, but nothing to get feathers ruffled over. It's the accumulation of it all, in combination with the parade of problems dealt with via email during the past three months, that made the handing D. his walking papers inevitable.
A good soul -- or so I thought at one time -- but for whatever reasons at this moment in his existence, not even close to qualifying as a housesitter.
And that's life. You make a decision, you see how things go, then you make another decision. On to getting a replacement.
************
This morning, far too early -- East Calais, Vermont:
Madrid, te echo de menos.
rws 9:58 PM [+]
Comments:
Post a Comment