Fapo

The homestead in late autumn:

Sorry about the unannounced sabbatical. Severe writer’s block and an ongoing series of personal crises ruled my life over the past eight weeks.

Let’s enumerate:

On the day she left for her third semester at college, Adie’s boyfriend called out of the blue and broke up with her. Distraught, Adie drove to school, hit a rumble strip in the passing lane of an interstate, and over-reacted. She spun out and went into a guardrail.
Only after twenty-four hours later, I found out about it. The car was totaled but she came out of it unscathed. A week later, because she had no car, she couldn’t get to the pharmacy and being a typical twenty-year-old kid, blithely withdrew from some high powered meds that had been prescribed to deal with a general anxiety problem she has.
The meds were prescribed about six months ago and help her concentrate on academics.

The withdrawal symptoms were horrendous. Adie had hallucinations and became self-destructive. Again I only found out about this later, after getting a cryptic phone call in the night, and emailing her and her friends in school. Her friend sent back a one-liner saying that she had a “pretty rough night”, which I later learned included an attempt to jump out of a window.

Meanwhile B1 was calling me every day. It seems that the equity loans she took out on what used to be our house was against some sub-prime shyster and the payments were about to double. She was already behind in her mortgage payments, has a broken refrigerator, a nearly dead furnace, and is about one mortgage payment away from defaulting. She can’t sell her house, since the loan and appraisal was made back in the salad days of 2004. She is now in a negative equity situation, and can’t sell the house for the amount she borrowed.

Meanwhile B2 never calls me. She is still looking for a job and is at risk of losing her house. B2 has lots of assets (she owns three homes) but has borrowed from Peter to pay Paul. Paul is now showing up the door, with his thumb-breaking friend named Vinnie.

The next shoe to drop was a physical assault by Adie’s ex-boyfriend on a Friday night.
The assault was not sexual, but Adie was bruised pretty badly. After much prodding and a few phone calls to school administrators, Adie came forward and told officials of the incident.

So most of my time has been spent doing remote crisis management for Adie. Needless to say it hasn’t been easy, but it was made worse by cell-phones, which have spotty connectivity in the mountains of northern Vermont. Invariably I’d get a phone call, with
Adie sobbing on the other end, and then get garbled information that would be truncated by a dropped call. I was going nuts just trying to get in touch with her and clarify what was going on. Many places in the third world would be logistically easier.

After several trips by B1 and myself to her school during the weekends, we got Adie back on her medication. She went to counseling and support at the school to deal with any trauma regarding the physical attack, and is busy finishing her semester while sending applications for transfer to some large universities in Boston. Given that Boston is less than an hour away and has pretty decent and reliable communication infrastructure, a transfer sounds like a blessing.

Oh, I have met and started dating a wonderful woman, named L. She has endured two months of this nonsense and has been more than supportive. To add some comic relief to my personal life, L and I got carried away on a weekend and put us in the precarious position of worrying about becoming fifty-year-old parents. Thankfully, L’s pregnancy test turned out negative. I immediately marched down to the doctor’s office and arranged for an appointment with an urologist to get myself gilded. Since then L and I have been dutifully restricting ourselves to holding hands and watching old movies.

Presumably in five weeks I will be officially sterile. As Forest Gump said, “One less thing.”

I find myself quoting Gump a lot recently.

When I was thinking about buying “Two Plows” I was a little apprehensive about the maintenance issues. I had been spoiled living in civilization where there were neighborhoods, very good services, and where I was co-habitating with women. My broker looked at me oddly and reminded me that I would be purchasing this from an eighty two year old lady who hobbled on a cane.

With some luck I might be able to manage.

Still, the owner had only lived in the house during the summer months for at least a decade. Presumably her son spent a year living here a couple of years ago, so I suspect everything is in order for dealing with a long New Hampshire winter, but I am still a little nervous.

Because “Two Plows” is high on a hill-top we already had an infrastructure failure. The downstairs toilet had a “jiggle the handle” problem which was unattended for an afternoon, and the excess discharge of water dried up the well. It recovered in about a couple of hours, but it drove home the fact that living so high off the valley creates special challenges. Often when wells go dry, the pump at the bottom of the well can burn out. When the well is very deep, as this one obviously has to be, fixing a pump can cost thousands of dollars.

So a new rule for “Two Plows” is that showers are limited to five minutes. The other issue will be the high winds and cold that it is exposed to during the winter. When I lived with B1 in our small starter home, we had an ugly but very practical wood stove in the living room. B1 hated it because of aesthetics. I loved it because it kept us warm on brutally cold nights when the central heating either gave out or couldn't produce enough BTUs to warm the upstairs.

The art of loading up a wood stove on a cold winter night required learning how to properly adjust the intake of air. With air vents open, there would be a period of a few hours of slow burn as the wood would heat up and dry. Then there would be a burst of heat for one or two hours where the dried wood would incinerate all at once. I used to have visions of spontaneous combustion and would often go downstairs and sleep on the couch.

When I bought the house, the liner in the existing fireplace needed to be replaced. It would set me back at least two or three thousand dollars. I've always harbored survivalist instincts, so I started making phone calls to inquire about putting a wood stove in the existing fireplace, hoping that this alternative would give me a much better secondary supply of heat for about the same price that would have been spent fixing the fireplace.

I discovered a great local store that offered alternative heating energy solutions for the home. It included state of the art wood stoves, but lots of other choices: propane, wood pellets, and anthracite coal. I talked to the owner of the store for what I expected would be a five minute conversation. Instead the discussion went on for the better part of an hour as he enthusiastically talked about the variety of options and the pros and cons of each in terms of ease of use, price of stoves, and price and availability of fuel.

According to him pellet technology has a long way to go. Wood pellets are manufactured from sawdust collected at wood mills. The dust is compressed with some sort of binder into pellet form. The advantage of this system is price and convenience. It is cheaper than firewood and because the pellets are manufactured in small standardized pellets, the stoves can behave more like a conventional burner, with automated feeding of fuel that is controlled by a thermostat. According to the store owner, the problem with pellets is that the technology is new and the burn characteristics of the pellets problematic. He claimed that pellet stoves were forever having problems and were constantly in need of service.

Propane is becoming popular because of its simplicity and instant gratification. You just flick a switch and you have the aesthetics of a wood fire without the hassle of hauling in wood from a wood pile buried in snow and trying to get a fire started. Propane is good for easy local heat, but still not the solution for augmenting or replacing the oil system for the entire house.

When the heat store owner started talking about coal, the pace and enthusiasm in his voice quickened. Then he launched off for the better part of the hour explaining the nuances of modern automated coal burning stoves. He had one installed against the protests of his wife, who had nineteenth century visions of coal and steam technology churning in their living room, but after the installation, she was beyond pleased.

While his fervor was infectious, I was more entranced by the mix of both retro and contemporary technologies: intelligent sensors and motors to feed small uniform pellet size anthracite into a stove controlled by a state of the art thermostat. The stove itself looks like a throwback to the Victorian era, with a classic black finish with a window that looked like the coal hatch one would see in the engine room of an old locomotive. The brass fittings only enhanced this imagery.

What clinched it for me was the vision of having my Massachusetts Al Gore loving friends over on a cold winter night for beer and conversation, and excusing myself for a moment only to bring in a bag of anthracite to fill the coal hopper.

I trembled at the thought of watching their horrified faces.

“Two Plows” is going to be a lot of fun.

On reflection over the past few months, perhaps the hardest part about dealing with B2 was witnessing her emotionally checked out demeanor and her complete unwillingness to share responsibility for the situation. It triggered painful memories of a eight years ago when B1 had an emotional melt down that quickly led to our divorce.

It happened suddenly in winter of 1999, just after having a typical and happy Christmas holidays. One night in January we were sitting in bed and B1 announced that she was feeling distant from me, but did not articulate why. I tried to draw her out but she couldn’t really put her finger on what was wrong. After a few days of seeing that this was not just a bad night, I suggested that she re-establish sessions with a counselor. For seven years she had seen a brilliant doctor at McLean Hospital who had done wonders with her. For reasons I did not understand then, but do now, B1 instead went to a local councelor, one that she had never seen before.

Then B1 started disappearing at night, coming home late, and never calling. I started worrying about her. One night she went out across the street to get a few items at a store and didn’t come back. By two o’clock at night I had called the police, called all her friends, and my brother in California. I was sure something had happened to her. She showed up at 3:30 in the morning and claimed she was with a friend and that she didn’t call because she had left the phone near JayWon’s bed and didn’t want to wake her.

Nothing seemed to be adding up.

About a week later, again in bed, she said that she didn’t want to be married. I was dumbstruck. Up until Christmas she had been kind, warm, and attentive. Our relationship had many flaws but I had always perceived her as being a dedicated wife and mother. I spent many nights almost hysterical with grief, trying to hide the sobs from the girls who had no clue what was going on.

I tried to convince B1 to go to couples counseling and found a very good woman who had a good track record of dealing with these sorts of things. B1 reluctantly went. The counselor was name Dawn who saw the emotional detachment immediately. After two sessions she told us that she didn’t want us to come back unless we were really interested in saving the marriage. Afterwards I called Dawn privately, and she told me that the message was really being directed towards B1, who then declined to go to future meetings.

I was beside myself trying to salvage my world. I needed help so asked Dawn if I could get individual counseling from her. She said yes. When I went in for the first meeting she told me she had some bad news. She told me that she didn’t give up on seventeen-year-old marriages easily but my marriage was over. She said B1 didn’t have the emotional ability to be a wife. She also validated my suspicions about B1 being sexually abused as a young girl. Dawn thought the age of Adie triggered this meltdown.

In so many ways that harsh message was a relief to hear. That I was not the cause of this, that the seeds were planted long before I ever entered B1’s life. It also explained why B1 chose not to go back to someone who knew her so well.

If she had gone back to her old counselor, she would have been told that the problems had less to do with me than it did with unresolved issues in her childhood. By going to a complete stranger, B1 could, on the first meeting, paint any picture she wanted of our marriage. That’s what she did, and within the first session the counselor was recommending that she get divorced.

The big problem I was facing were the girls, ages 12 and 14. They had not seen any arguments between B1 and myself and had no clue of what was going on. I had to force B1 to talk to the children as a family and tell them that we were going to live apart. She kept minimizing the impact on the kids. B1 chose Easter Sunday, and the girls bounced into our bedroom expecting us to tell them something about a summer vacation or some other long term plans as a family.

I did the talking and explained that B1 was having issues that went back to when she was a child and that she did not feel comfortable any longer living with a man. So I said I was moving out to give B1 the space she needed.

Adie instantly became hysterical. She wanted to know where I was going and what did this mean as far as where she would live. She wanted to know if it meant that she would no longer see her grandparents and Sis. Both of us reassured Adie that everything would stay the same, except I would be living somewhere else.

JayWon’s reaction almost made me physically ill. She froze and sat motionless staring and not even blinking. Slowly a tear ran down her cheek. It was at this point B1 excused herself and said that she had to go downstairs to do some work in the kitchen.

I sat with JayWon who was still rigid and held her close to my chest. I carried her over to the bed and rocked her for about an hour. She then quietly told me that she wanted some time alone and went off to her bedroom.

About four weeks later I pulled up to the house on a Sunday with a small van to get a few things to take with me. B1 puttered around the house totally ignoring me. I carried things into the van with a buddy of mine. The kids were playing around the house on what was a beautiful sunny late May day.

When I drove off, B1 never said goodbye. The day after I drove back to what had been the home of everyone I loved. I saw that residual clothes I had left in the closet were tossed in a thoughtless heap outside, where the girls would see them on their way out the door when going to school.

It was my relationship with the girls that turned things around, but it took me a long time to recover from those awful days.