SPRING 3

EMERGENCE

It took half of April before I realized that I wasn't scraping ice from the truck windshield each morning after running the defroster for fifteen minutes. I even flirted with the idea of getting out my warm weather clothes, but abandoned that idea quickly. Even now, as I write this at the tail end of June, I keep a pair of sweatpants and a light hoodie hanging in my bedroom. I turn off the fans two out of five nights and laugh at the idea of air conditioning.
Let' see how I feel about that in August.
By early April, the grass began to get a slight green flush about it and before I knew it, other green things began to emerge through the still-frozen ground.
My problem was figuring out which were perennial plantings and which were weeds.
I let it all grow.
The first thing to turn its face to spring was my pear tree. Sitting below a dead pine in the backyard, it flushed and budded before anything else.
I went out to examine it one warmish morning, coffee in hand and a smile on my face at the end of the long dark winter. I was happy with the emerging green but sad at the fact that I'd eventually have to cut down the dead pine that loomed almost seventy feet high to the right of the pear. It had been dead when I saw the property in September and it had been dead when I arrived the following October.
"What the hell??" I said aloud in mid-sip. "It's a miracle!"
The pine was sporting tiny little needles as green as an electric leprechaun.
It wasn't a miracle, really. It was a larch, one of only a handful of deciduous conifers in the world. Around here it's called a tamarack. Either way, it was coming back to life. I was happy I didn't have to cut it down and even happier that it was alive.

                                                               The pear in bloom

The larch awakes

 

Below these trees, a collection of wide, fuzzy leaves appeared (look beneath the pear). More on these later.

 

Across the street, on the very edge of the road, a host of dark and light green spears began to push through the leaves. Frost and still-frozen ground be damned; these things were as ready as I to see winter end. I recognized the darker spears as daffodils (jonquils to you English Majors), but was not sure what the lighter green was. I rightly guessed they were day lilies.

 

 

 I raked the area around the emerging spears to give them a little breathing room. I'll bet Bertha Izbicki, the last of the Izbickis to live in the Standish House (Granny to many in the neighborhood), tended these yearly. She might even have planted them, but plenty of folks were here before her.

Other plants were emerging, blooming, or budding out.

 

                                                    vinca minora sporting a few flowers

 This thing is covered with closely spaced needles that just scream out "I will kill you!!" It is some sort of a bush rose that eventually produced beautiful, fragrant pink flowers. It would still be happy to kill you.

 

                                    Rhododendron loaded with buds that were there last fall.

                                               The plant on the right is an oriental poppy.

                 These came out earliest of all; they are beneath the pear tree. More on them later.

                                                                   Pear blossom with leaves

                                         Fiddlehead ferns in the front yard. I let them grow.

 This plant was found growing in the cinder block when I removed the topiary in November. It had climbed into the topiary's branches and sported pretty white flowers, even in late fall. I took it out this spring and planted it in the ground in the same spot, where it thrives. I have found four or five others growing wild on the property.

 

                                Little violets peppered the yard for a couple weeks in April

 These were emerging all over the property. The leaves look rather chrysanthemumish, so I let them go about their business. Turned out they are some sort of weeds, but they put out pretty yellow flowers that look sort of like giant buttercuspidors.

 

 Walking through the woods in fall, I found huge briars with wicked inch-long thorns made of a substance not far removed from bone. These thorns can (I'm not making this up) take a holt of your shirt or jacket, and the only way out of their grasp is to remove the garment. The only way to retrieve the garment is to cut the briar canes and drag the whole thing out, and when it's finished with your jacket, all you have are bloody, thorn-punctured hands holding a few threads.
I wasn't sure if this thing was a domestic rose gone ballistic or one o' them there briars, so I let it go. It followed its twenty-foot-wide fellows in the forest, informing me of its identity (smilax rotundifolia to you taxonomy nerds). I let this one grow to observe its feeding habits and attack tactics, but others on the property were under my microscope for destruction.

 Poison ivy vines clinging to the machine shed. I waited patiently for leaves to form so I could POISON THE GODDAMN THING!!!!! One bad turn deserves another.

 

 One of the sad things to emerge once the snow was gone and the leaves were in the process of being raked was this 18th century door, likely an original from the house. Thin with four panels, it was found half-buried near the machine shed.

 

 This pile of pre-split firewood was gleaned from the patch of high grass at the northwest corner of the yard. I only found it by walking there and nearly breaking my ankle. Apparently a large tree, long since removed, had been cut up in place, then forgotten. It will be put to good use this next winter.

 The patch of deep, dense grass from which the firewood was pulled. I am still harvesting wood from the edges of the patch now in June, but since I've been mowing it regularly, the long grass has shortened and become a part of the lawn.

 

 Berry canes, which I recognized when I moved in in October and so did not whack them with the weedeater. The neighbors tell me that they have all been raiding these for their berry bounty since Bertha Izbicki has been gone. They're mine now!

 

 New growth promising many berries. But what kind of berries? The neighbors call them raspberries, but I'm used to blackberries in Arkysaw. They look wild to me, so might be huckleberries, whatever the hell they are. I though those only grew down south. Perhaps they're all the same and only local vernacular lists them as different.

And why are they called RASPberries, anyway?

 Some things I was glad to see taken over by new growth. Below this rash of green is a household trash pile and a bunch of rotting firewood. It will be cleaned out next winter. Note thee japonica behind the garage.

 

 New leaves on the chokecherry, emerging from the ground up. This was loaded with tiny tart cherries last fall, and I had no time to pick them (the same with the hundreds of pounds of pears). This fall will be different. The cherry is actually on the remaining Izbicki land next door, but they don't mind me doing some harvesting.

 

                                                                          Cherry leaves

 The spot where the station wagon used to be. Note the flattened remains of the dead skunk in the background (to the right under the trees). It was left there as a warning, and apparently was effective as such.

 I have no idea what this bush is, but it looks domestic, familiar, and has no thorns. It stays.

 This was an interesting find. I recognized these hairy things as chestnut husks, and since chestnut is perty much extinct, I got very excited. They were found just south of the greenhouse.

 

 Chestnut grove. Six or seven trees

 Proof is in the pudding, or in this case, in the leafing. This leaf is similar to American chestnut, but has more rounded lobes. This is Chinese chestnut, according to the locals.

 Ferns began to announce themselves in the woods, They resemble Boston ferns. The small plant to the southwest is a skunk cabbage. With a fine little wetland in the middle of the property, I am blessed with a plethora of these.

 

Strange things can be found in the woods behind a 324 year old farmhouse. This is an iron bed, around which a number of vines and plants have entwined themselves.

Jack-in-the-pulpit. I have thousands of these

 This is a dry well. I have no idea what it did or what it does, but it has a very large rock on top of it to keep small children from falling in. Pity. I may have the rock removed. Might as well make some use of the thing.

 

 





 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



SPRING 2

THE SLEEPER WAKES

By the beginning of April, the last patches of snow had finally disappeared, the dogs were contained, and the garage roof was shored.
The loss of snow also revealed all the things that lay beneath, and it wasn't pretty. I'd begun to empty out the greenhouse's clutter, throwing the trash wood into one pile, the useable wood and flowerpots into another, and the trash into yet another. I found the Preston 'transfer station,' a rural Connecticut phenomenon our extremely high taxes support. I remember "transfer stations" in South Carolina, which were a collection of beat-up dumpsters where you tossed your trash, got chased by clouds of yellowjackets, and invariably found unwanted animals.
I dreaded taking my trash there.
The transfer stations up here are modern manned facilities that separate household, recycleable, and metal refuse. If you pay town taxes, you get a sticker and can use the facility for free, except for large and heavy items for which you are charged a fee. They are also the place you get to meet your neighbors and exchange news on Saturday.
This was truly a blessing, especially when you consider that all my outbuildings were filled waist-high with trash, old tires littered the property, and I now could begin a real clean-up.
I became a regular at the station.

                                                               Inside the machine shed

                      The item under the gray tarp is an intact wood cook stove. I did not toss this.

                          Inside the greenhouse I found a lot of antique wood as well as trash

 The barn was filled with furniture, mostly deteriorated antiques. Some pieces, especially Victorian era chairs, were worth saving.

 

                                                  Starting to clear out the greenhouse

Clearing out the machine shed. I call it this because it's where I keep my floor tools such as the drill press, band saw, and lathe. Not that I had room to use them at this point. It was trash-filled, dusty, and smelled strongly of kerosene from a leaking barrel. Note the ever-expanding hole in the barn roof to the left.

The grass began to turn from brown to green and some few plants showed buds. I raked and cut old dried stems with my weedeater for a time, but decided to park it as new plants emerged. I needed to see what perennials would come up; this was, after all, a farm.
And just as I was completing the dog fence, they all got out one last time. They found a skunk living in the barn and the Akita got a little too close. She slept outside for a couple of nights and the smell went gratefully away. I found the skunk's den, flushed it, and killed it. Others would come around.

Then there was the night I went out into the dark yard to move the truck from the barn to the side gate. I could barely see dark spots that were trash piles as I carefully navigated the yard, nearly blind in the dark. The still-frozen ground was bare of snow for the first time.
"Hmm," I said to myself in the side yard. "I don't remember there being a trash pile there." It was a smallish dark pile and I skirted it by a few feet. But as I drove the truck out of the barn driveway, a long, dark animal slunk across the road in front of me. It looked like a long, low cat with a bushy tail, and it moved like flowing water.
"There aren't any cats around here," I said. Then I gasped. "Damn! They were telling the truth!"
The guys at work had been warning me of a local creature known as a 'fisher cat.' I thought they were pulling the chain of this Arkansaw Boy. It was known to attack dogs, dig under fences to kill chickens, and even to attack small children. It kills for pleasure, often not eating but one bird after wiping out twenty chickens in a coop.
I had no doubt that the thing that slipped across the road was an example. Going back to the unexplained dark spot in the yard, I found it gone.
I'd almost stepped on the thing.

Stock photo of a fisher cat

 

                                                          Not to be tangled with

I researched the thing and found that they are of the marten family. They're actually small wolverines, if truth be told. One of the fiercest animals in this hemisphere, and right at the top of the food chain.
A week later, my neighbor saw it as well, slinking out of the same spot in my yard.
Great. Just fracking great.

I also scored a burning permit and began a weekly program of burning that which would not pollute or go to the transfer station. One of the first things to go on the fire was my collection of topiary that I cut the day after closing on the house. The bushes had to be wrested from the still-frozen ground, but they crackled nicely upon setting a match to them.

                              First burning pile; it has since been moved out of the fenced yard

Then one gray morning, rain began to fall. The temperatures broke the forties and flirted with fifty in one out of four days. A slight green flush could be seen across the land.
Spring had begun. Three weeks late, to be sure, but it was here at last.

SPRING 1 - GETTING OUT AT LAST

After dealing with the refrigerator alcove, I was pumped to do something else. Unfortunately, the snow had other ideas. It kept falling for the rest of February and a good deal of March.
By March 22nd, this was all that was left.

I ventured forth to examine the garage. I needed a place to build things and stage them for installation around the property, and the garage had the best roof and the most room.
It also had one of the most important repair issues; the adjacent greenhouse roof, which had been collapsing since I first saw the building in September of 2012.

                         First pic of the deteriorated roof rafter ends in the greenhouse; it is held up by roof decking

                                               Continued ceiling collapse two years later

First order of business; build a work table. Note the window sashes in the background. They are 18th and 19th century sashes from which I harvested glass for the Avondale Project (that will post later in my other blog, 'Architectural Vestiges' Shop Notes), and they were going to be thrown away. I intend to restore them and use them to glaze the greenhouse. Stay tuned.
So I prepared to do some rafter repair. The snow was perty much gone, the ground was still frozen solid, and I itched to do what the winter had robbed me of the opportunity of.

That was the most improper and convoluted sentence I've writ in some time. And it felt good.

The garage itself had some rotted rafter ends, and the leaking roof had destroyed the plates at the top of the cinder block wall upon which the plates sit, so I had to jack, support, and replace all the bad wood on the garage side. Afterwards I'd do the bigger roof project, The Greenhouse. Stay tuned.

                         Jacks, stiffleg, and jacking plate. Note the rafter ends have been cut off

New rafter ends sistered onto the originals, a new pressure treated plate set, and doubled up 'joists' upon which I would store long boards

 

Almost complete. The cross-like structure ties the center of the 'joists' to the roof peak to prevent joist sag once I load them with wood. Two more would follow. The rack to the right holds a messa western red cedar I scarfed from a demolition in Little Rock. I plan to reuse it, possibly as a picket fence.

THE DOG FENCE

 The first thing I did after moving into the house was build a fence around the back yard to keep in the dogs. Since  1987 I have always had at least one dog in my life, and more recently, I have always had a passel of canines. I prefer their company to most humans.
"Passel," by the way, is Arkansawyer talk for 'a lot.' Also known as "a messsa." Passel likely comes from 'parcel,' though my four dogs would make "a messa" a parcel if it was dropped through the front door.
A different meaning entirely.
My pack consists of four 'found' dogs, i.e. those that others didn't want or tossed away. The oldest, Cheese, is a thirteen year old German shepherd, and the only male. He thinks he is the Alpha. He is wrong.

 The next is Marley, a short, stocky Akita that stands less than two feet tall and weighs eighty-five pounds. She is sweet but trusts very few humans other than those she's met.

 The smallest, and by far the fiercest, is my ShitZoo Cheerio. She is also the friendliest and most playful. And yes, at fifteen pounds, she is the Alpha and will not hesitate to discipline the other dogs.

Then there is Speckle.
Speckle Rhetta King is the only one of my pack that I adopted from her actual birth mother, and I knew her father as well. He was a standard boxer that was abused and abandoned before being adopted by my neighbor in Roland, Arkansas. Speckle's mom was a beautiful German shepherd that was kept tied to a tree in the backyard of another house next door in Roland, and if there is anything I can't abide, it's a tied-up dog. She was also neglected, and I was her favorite human.

                                                            Sheba, very sad and immobile

                                               Sheba, renamed Greta, with her new Mom

Boxer Lucky (actual name Rocky) got together with G.s. Sheba (renamed Greta once I found helped find a better home for her), and six  pups were the result. Since Cheese was getting on in years, I decided to adopt the Alpha female (after finding homes for the remaining puppies) while he could still be a positive influence. I named her Speckle Rhetta.

She was so cute it hurt. She was wormy and had fleas, but I cured her and Cheerio became her Mom.
I figured she couldn't possibly get very big; Rocky was a standard forty-five pound boxer and Greta weighed about the same.
But, But, BUT!
There must have been a recessive gene somewhere, because this dog grew and grew and grew until she was eighteen feet high and weighed seventeen million pounds.
Okay, that's a slight exaggeration. But at one year old, she was almost ninety-six pounds and stood over three feet high at the shoulder.

Baby

                                                                            Adolescent

                                                 Playing with her sister at eight months

                                                            Ninety pounds at ten months

This is why I'm including her in this post.
Having a Giant Puppy presents its own problems. Speckle can almost put her head onto thw kitchen counter, so precautions must be taken. She once ate a roll of blue painters' tape, ate another the following week, and followed that with a roll of green Frogtape. She followed this with three gallons of black oil sunflower seeds and a half a bag of natural hardwood charcoal. I know this because I pick up after my dogs in the backyard; finding Speckle poop was easy when it glowed bright green.
As I said (wrote), the fence was my first priority after unloading the trailer. I've lived in the country for a lot of years, and I have never let my dogs run. One dead chicken or cat and I'll have a dead dog, an angry neighbor, and a vendetta. I wanted none of the above.
So I bought some metal T-posts, a T-post tubular banger, and two hundred feet of welded wire fence. It took me over three days, but I installed the four-foot  fence and built a gate. I let the dogs out and they seemed happy.
My first day of work at Early New England Restorations was the first day the dogs were alone at the new property, and when I returned after dark, I saw a strange dog standing in the driveway. "Jeez, it doesn't take long for the other dogs to start coming around...."
But it wasn't a strange dog; it was Cheese, and he was covered in black, stinking mud.
As were all of the others.
They had found the fence easy pickins and after trampling it, also found the pond out back. Which is filled with stinking black mud. Or perhaps it was the swamp in the deep valley across the street.
They spent the night outside (after they all came back with sheepish grins), and I repaired the fence.
This went on for weeks.
I'd leave for work, they'd get out. I'd return and scold them, then spend an hour repairing the fence.
I am not stupid, people. I watched and studied their actions, and I adapted the fence to repel their need to escape. I added wooden supports where they would jump on the wire, collapsing it. I'd bend the wire in so they couldn't get over it (right). I still came home to an empty yard and a pack of very guilty (but happy and footsore) dogs.
I added eighteen inches of OSB plywood to the top of the fence, added more wooden uprights, and all escapes stopped. The fence looked like shit and swayed a lot in the wind, but it kept the dogs in.
Mostly.

                                 Note the fence to the right of the picture; it's got the OSB

Oh, I'd come home and find Speckle in the front yard, waiting with a guilty smile. The others couldn't get out, but she could.
I looked for holes, and found none. The Akita had chewed through the welded wire a few times, but I'd patched those. How the hell was this dog getting over the fence?
Then the snow came and froze. It fell and froze and fell and froze a number of times morer. This raised the ground another two feet, making the fence practically ineffective.
I was at wit's end. It was only Speckle that was getting out now, and she was often in the front yard when I returned, but she was OUT. She seldom WENT anywhere, but that would likely end in spring. And as I said, a Traveling dog is a Dead dog.
Then one day as the snow was melting in March, I saw how she was doing it.
I came home, found something torn up, scolded her, and she ran out to the backyard. She took one leap and as quick as you can say 'knife,' she was up and over it.
The bitch never came close to touching the OSB, either. She just hunkered down and SPRANG.
I know that's not a word. But who is to be the master, the writer or the word?
'Nuff said.
I had to make sure this was her ONLY way out.
So I set up a video camera to see what happened as soon as I left. There were a few starts and false stops, but eventually I got it on tape.
MY GOD!! She could leap a SIX-and-a-half foot fence and not touch it!
It was time to end the frustration.
I went to Tractor Supply and bought about a hundred bucks' worth of electric fence. I installed one line about ten inches from the base of the wire fence and twelve inches high; that would deter the Akita from trying to eat through the base of the wire fence, which she had been wont to do. Then I strung a line about five feet high and twelve inches inside the top of the wire fence.
I tested it too.
GODDAMN!!! It hurt like hell! 110 volts running through my muscles was enough o deter ME from jumping the fence.
But would it work on Speckle?
The answer was, in a word, NO.
She jumped THROUGH the electric wire the first day, bending it and stretching it and again ending up in the front yard.
She wouldn't jump back over into the yard, though.
'Ah-HA!' I thought.
After repairing the electrical wire, I noted her reluctance to jump through it.
Then, about three days later, she did just that, taking a good deal of the wire with her.
I growled and pummpphed, then set to work.
I had been worried about her getting caught in the wire and electrocuting herself, and now I had to face the fact that this dog was really pushing the containment envelope.
I installed another wire up top and a mid-level wire below in the two places she seemed to like to jump the fence.
When I came home the next day, all dogs were inside the fence.
As they were the next day. And the next.

                   Not going near the fence, but they got braver after a while. The shutters, removed from the house the first week of my occupation of the house, were part of the fence reinforcement before electrifying it.

Oh, sure. I heard the yelps of pain when each one of them hit the wire with their noses or legs that first day. I stayed home for half a day to make sure they didn't hurt themselves. There were burned noses and bruised egos and they'd run inside and wouldn't come back out for  a half a day.
And despite the occasionally bent upper wires, after a week I knew that they wouldn't even approach the fence again. All of them eventually got to the point that they'd stay about two feet from it, and everything got back to normal.
Except Speckle. She has a prehistoric brain and so I still hear a yelp in the back yard once in a great while.
But she doesn't get out.
And I can I leave the fence off most of the time now.
It is hard for me to imagine how stressed out I was during that period.
I'm MUCH better now.

REFRIGERATOR ALCOVE

Winter was simply a bitch. It dragged on until late March, and I had to curtail my plans to use all dry, snowless days to begin the much-needed repairs on the outbuildings.
There WERE no dry, snowless days after mid-January.
Prime among these repairs were the barn and greenhouse/garage roofs, both which had serious holes, leaks, and structural problems.

One project was finally tackled four months after moving in; that of expanding the refrigerator alcove. It was February, I was restless for a project I could actually DO, and I was tired of walking to the studio for food.

This opening housed a dead refrigerator when I moved in, and my own larger model was relegated to the studio, the room to the west of the kitchen. This made it somewhat tedious to cook, which I do regularly.

The opening was about an inch smaller than my fridge, so I put the task off while I installed heat, repaired the water heater, and worked my ass off to pay for the move's remaining/mounting expenses.

One Saturday in February, I'd had enough, and using my Sawzall, jig saw, and multiple hand tools, I set to work.

The wood facing was attached with square nails, so I figured it was a bit older than some of the other trim in the kitchen. It wasn't chestnut, and wasn't as old as the fireplace mantle, but I decided to work around the trim without removing it. I removed the dead fridge, cleaned out the alcove, and removed the plaster and lath.

                         The kitchen before moving in. Even the tiny dead refrigerator was a tight fit.

The alcove floor after pulling out the lath and plaster on the sides. On the ground are the remnants of rodent nests, debris, and a few artifacts that fell out of the stair stringers above. Among these are a zinc mason jar lid with milk glass insert, a deteriorated Barlow knife, a large cut spike, a medicine bottle ("Dr. Setharnold's Balsam") complete with cork, a small zinc bottle top and a hand-forged farm hook.

 

Once cleaned out, I noticed several interesting Vestiges. The floor of the alcove was installed much later than the kitchen floor, and investigation in the cellar revealed that this was once the stair entrance to the cellar.
That the studs are made of 1" thick wood slabs, some complete with their rough-tree profile (look at the edges), was surprising, especially as they were installed flat side out. Modern buildings (and this house's exterior walls) are framed with the flat side (the wide side of the stud) facing sideways along the direction of the wall.
What intrigued me even more were the hand-planed siding boards at the base of the studs. They resemble exterior siding from very old early Colonial structures; thick, beveled top and lapped bottom, and adding serious strength to the structure.
But this is an INTERIOR wall, and it always was. The original corner of the building is in the blue-hued room beyond. I know this because I removed the wood from a recently-trimmed over vertical corner post and found it to be of 'gunstock' design, an obvious 17th/18th century architectural marker, and one that nearly always supports two plates at a ninety-degree angle.

'Gunstock' corner from the Harvard Carriage Shed. Note the wider left end, which would have been the top, and would support thick horizontal plates meeting at a ninety-degree angle.

                         My best guess is that the horizontal boards are some sort of wainscot.

 

 

I measured my refrigerator and the space between the studs. It was the same. I needed to trim the facing board on the right back by three-quarters an inch (and remove the shelf and scroll-sawn trim above, alas). Even then it was unlikely to fit. I'd need a minimum of a sixteenth of an inch per side (an eighth would be a realistic minimum, but my magic is strong), but I cut the facing trim back and prayed I wouldn't have to sand and plane the studs; they were loaded with small nails and were, after all, eight to ten inches wide apiece. Making them thinner would be just a TAD problematic. The facing board on the left was flush with the studs, and was not to be trimmed except in an extreme emergency.

 



 

Apparently my magic IS strong! I think I had the help of whatever else lives here. With some shoving and side-to side jockeying, the Big Fridge was sweetly placed (shoved, kicked, pleaded with) into the alcove. You can't put a sheet of paper between the trim and fridge, and I knew it would stick out a bit, but it fit!

And I got to keep the top of the scrolled trim.

 

Funny thing was, it took almost two months before I stopped going back to the studio to get things out of the fridge, even though it was now in the kitchen. The fridge was in the room to the right, to the left of the windows.



                                 WINTER

 

                                                          Deep

I’d rather not dwell too much on this past winter, especially now that it is as glorious a spring as I’ve seen in years. Perhaps it was the deadly winter that makes spring so sweet this year.

We had a white Christmas. Then a white New Year. It went on like that for some time.  It got colder and colder, and the snow came every week and just would not melt enough to do anything but create a layer of ice on top. On the 21^st of January, the snow fell over the partially-melted snow from before, and that set the standard for the next couple of months. Snow turns to ice, snow falls on ice, rinse and repeat.

 

                                                             Deeper

 

                                     More on the way; the beginning of ten inches

By early February, there was no walking on the farm without falling and breaking something essential. Just getting from the steps to the truck became well-nigh impossible. It was a daily chore to clear the snow from the truck.

                                                                    Two feet

 

Salt became scarce, then was nonexistent in the stores.

I couldn’t do anything but huddle by the fire and turn up the wall-mounted gas heaters.

 

The fireplace, though pretty, just created a wind-tunnel from the dog-door to the chimney, so it was useless as a heat source. The dogs liked it, though.

 

The wall-mounted LP gas heaters, special ordered from Montville Hardware (the Best Hardware Store in the World), saved the day.

Then the unthinkable happened.

The water heater, which I had repaired when I moved in, developed a major gas leak when the pilot assembly disintegrated.

I smelled something strange when I left for work that morning, but it didn’t smell like gas.

That evening, when I returned, the smell was gone. But the heater quit just after I lit it, and going into the basement, I knew just how lucky I’d been. The cellar was filled with fumes. Apparently the gas came out at such a volume that it blew out the tiny pilot flame, saving the house.

Something in this house likes me.

I set up a fan, blew out the fumes and froze for a week until the gas company could make a delivery.   I also thanked my lucky ghost.

 

                        Some people get stick-ons to make these patterns, but these are real

It was pins and needles all winter, with no money left after the weekly expenses. It took me until Christmas to pay the surveyors, then I dropped a thou on the gas company, then another for taxes. I supplemented my heat with some oil-filled electric jobs, but after my second three-hundred-dollar bill from CL&P, I put those things away.

Finally March came. It was still cold, but the sun was working on the ice. By early April the last patches of ice melted, though it took a lot of salt (now available) to get the last bits to go away.

                                           March 22nd. Jennie King's birthday(my mom)

No work got done on the place between late December and late March.

Then I set my jaw, made a list, and got to work.

The sun was coming up earlier and setting later. Maybe I could actually get things done!

Then Daylight Savings Time began and I had light in the evenings. I had never appreciated it so much before.

Restoration of The Standish Farm, here I come.