House & Yard

Oook…squeak! {pace pace pace} Whimper! Oook! 

Dog wants out????

In a minnit, Dawg!

Get up off duff, stumble to the kitchen door, fling it open for Her Majesty…

Queen walks around in a circle. Strolls through the kitchen, ambles down the hallway, and heads for her nest under the back bathroom toilet.

Peer outside…

Water is POURING off the roof. Nooo, it’s not raining and hasn’t been raining in weeks. The water is leaking out of the air-conditioner, which clearly is calling out for an expensive repair job.

{sigh} Try to phone air-conditioning dude. Can’t find his number. Call the neighbor, who also hires the same guy. No answer. NATCHERLY: Today is Sunday!

Leave word.

**

Ain’t this loverly? I used to drive through this intersection every time I went out to the Great Desert University, thereinat to teach the young cuties who live in said neighborhood.

What a place we live in!

Every now and again, I contemplate the possibility of selling the Funny Farm and moving someplace safer. But…but…??????  Where on EARTH would that be?

Wherever there be humans, that place is not safe.

Get AC folks on the phone. They’ll send someone out here…whenever. That obviates my walking to the grocery store, which I needed to do…right now. 

But as you know, if I dast to pull any such stunt, that will deliver AC Dude to the front door, right now. 

****

Meanwhile, we wait and we wait and we wait and we wait and we…no sign of AC Dude. Well: not surprising. Forhevvinsake, it’s SUNDAY. Of course the guy doesn’t want to come flying over here at my beck and call.

The leak has stopped. Maybe I should call off the repair dude.

That will cause the leak to start up again, right?

Y’know…moments like this make the idea of moving into an old-folkerie like the Beatitudes look good.

Almost.

How can I count the ways I do not feel like sitting here (and sitting here and sitting here and sitting here) waiting for an AC guy to show up on freaking SUNDAY, f’rgodsake.

Hmmmm…  Temps are supposed to drop into the (very!) low 50s tonight. That will chill off the house…uhm…handsomely.

On the other hand, we have only a 4% chance of rain. So as long as no water falls out of the sky, a cold house will be…tolerable, I suppose.

Maybe I should call off AC Dude until tomorrow. Hm. Of course, there’s no guarantee he WILL show up tomorrow. If he doesn’t, then we’ll have two days (maybe three) of crisp temps in the house.

****

Toooo late! Call them on the phone: the poor guy is on his way.

The puddle out there has almost dried up.

For. Pete’s Sake!

******

Hmmm…. 

Look ye here:
https://ancestors.familysearch.org/en/KWV3-T2S/olive-catherine-getten-1891-1979

This little squib from Ancestors.com claims my mother’s mother — my supposed grandmother — died in 1979. That would have made her 88 when she died.

Uh huh.

My mother told me that she, as a teenager, attended her mother (Olive) on Olive’s deathbed. That she watched Olive die. And that she saw Olive’s body carted off in a hearse.

WTF?

Who was storyin’ there???

Either my mother made up a story and lied her way through it as she delivered it to me…

…or…

Her California family (put THAT in scare quotes!) lied to her in order to get her out of Olive’s hair.

My mother was Olive’s illegitimate child. After a court fight, custody of my (then-infant) mother was awarded to the New York father’s family, and she was largely brought up on her paternal grandparents’ dirt farm in the boondocks of upstate New York.

As you can imagine, in those conditions life expectancy did not normally extend into the 80s, as it does today.

Her grandmother — her father’s mother, the one who lived in the sticks in New York — died of diabetes at a fairly young age.

Since it was considered improper for a single man to live alone, unchaperoned, with a young girl, my mother was then sent to the California relatives.

Meanwhile, her own chippie mother (as the story is told) f*cked her way into a roaring case of uterine cancer, which supposedly carried her away when she was in her 30s. By then my mother was lodging with the California set. And she said she saw the woman die and be transported off down the road in a hearse.

Quite the little tale, isn’t it?

And it becomes more tale-like when indications that Olive did not die when my mother said she did.  Or…uhm…thought she did.

Did my mother lie about Olive’s death?

Why would she do that? A reasonable explanation would be that she never wanted to see the woman again and that she surely did NOT want her daughter to see the chippie woman.

hmmmm

Does that make sense? We spent ten years overseas, in Saudi Arabia, where it was mightily unlikely that Olive would surface and come back to haunt.

And my parents retired to Sun City, Arizona…where they could easily have NOT invited dear Olive to visit.

Yeah. Those are significant parts of the story that do NOT make sense.

Why do I have the worst feeling that Olive did not die when my mother said she died?

Why do I sense that my mother’s august family lied to her about Olive’s (non-)death?

If Olive lived until 1979…well! That was the year I completed the Ph.D. and the year my son — her grandson — was born. I wonder if she knew either of those little factoids about her family history.

The two most logical explanations: Either my mother’s family lied to her about Olive’s (non)demise, or my mother, knowing Olive was still kickin’, lied to me.

I do remember one time when my Aunt Gertrude, who was Olive’s sister, was visiting our house in Sun City and the subject of the family history came up…the subject of Olive’s alleged death, we might say.

Gertrude got the strangest look on her face as my mother recited the tale of Olive’s (alleged?) death and the removal of her body from the home, carted away in a hearse. And then we have the report of her at the site above, still kickin’ until 1979.

It raises two interesting questions, both of them probably unanswerable:

* Did my mother know that Olive didn’t die of cancer, that fateful croaking-over day?

* Did Olive know she had a grandson?

Well…there’s a third question: How evil can ya get?