The First Night
Late September in Minnesota is green and cool. December is brown. Cold. Dark. Scary. The lush vines that shaded the front porch of my old farmhouse were bare, spindly, and gray—like the fingers of a dying crone. The shrubs were thorny brambles. The lawn was the color of straw. Corn shucks had blown over from the field next door, got rained on, froze, thawed and froze again, and now they were like tatami mats surrounding the bases of the trees. I cried. And that night I froze. No heat.
I attempted to sleep on an air mattress, freezing, and weeping in my new old house. What had I done? What was I thinking? What do I do now? I mentally abused myself for having been impulsive, unrealistic, indulgent, and I found myself looking up from the bottom of the mile deep crevasse. I should have stayed in my little inch-deep trailer home in the Coachella Valley. I had left Blue Skies Village one sunny 78-degree day and the next day I was in Gray Sky Farmtown and it was 18 degrees overnight.
The place had a brick fireplace in the kitchen, and another one in the living room surrounded by massive brick hearths—but I didn’t know how to ignite the damn pilot lights. If I had stayed in the desert I would be sitting in the sun, deciding what to cook on my outdoor gas grill. Now I’m shivering on my knees in front of a no-heat heat source, swearing a blue streak and trying not to fry off my eyebrows.
One of the features that appealed to me most was a massive sea of bookshelves—almost enough for my massive sea of cookbooks. I had lived the past ten years without seeing them one single time. And while I had paid pennies to buy them I had paid plenty more to store them. And then paid again to move them half way across America so I could fill this massive wall of shelves. The bedroom in my mid-century trailer house was ten feet square. I parked in a carport. Now I found myself surrounded by five bedrooms, a three-car garage—with a dog run, no less. I didn’t own a dog, thank God, because the thought of walking a dog on a cold winter day is second only to walking a dog on a hot summer day. Why dogs can’t pee in the shower and poop in the toilet is beyond me. Cats can.
My sunny desert home had a huge patio with umbrella tables and lounge chairs, fragrant jasmine hedges, gardenias, and 50-year-old palm trees. Now I would look out my windows and see a crusty old wood barn, an off-the-rack steel building, and a vine-choked, one-room, outbuilding with an unfit-for-duty wood-burning stove. I had four acres of barren land, a garden of drooping carcasses of perennials, a rusty fire ring filled with frozen leaves and corn debris and something black and gooey. Bonus! The wild prairie wind had brought me the body of a moulded plastic Canada goose decoy…with no head. I still have it, if you’re missing one. The trees that loomed over the roof of the house threatened to toss a widow maker into my kitchen. Yep. This pit was miles and miles deep. And I had leapt in with both feet.
Maybe it was pride that made me stay. I couldn’t admit I had made a hundred and eighty thousand dollar, 1800-mile, 60 degree mistake. I couldn’t blame anyone. I turned a blind ear to the echoes of friends saying, “Don’t go.” But the moving truck was en route. Christmas was in a few weeks. And winter was already here. So I spent time learning about my new old house, and waited for the truck. And the furnace repair man.
