Eight Weeks of Hell! Post #3

We arrived back to Syracuse after our job hunt in Alabama, ready to move. Les was offered a job and was in Mobile in three weeks! I had been selling my household belongings on Craigslist for months. It was now evident that I must hold an estate sale to get down to what would fit in a 24-foot truck, all in the next three weeks! Everything was for sale if someone wanted to buy it! What mattered was that we hauled as little as possible to Alabama and had cash to cushion our new life for the first year.

On May 13, we jammed the truck with what was left of our belongings, along with Les’s jeep on a trailer behind. At 5 p.m. Les and the bird, in a cage on the passengers seat, headed to Alabama. The farthest south he had ever been, aside from our previous trip, was Pennsylvania. As I watched him pull from the curb and embark on the journey that had been my brainchild, I reveled at how brave he was! I knew that, no matter how much I had wanted it, I wouldn’t be brave enough to make the 1300-mile trip by myself - even if my family would be there in eight weeks!

He left on Tuesday and arrived Friday night. Since I still owned properties in Syracuse, we were unable to buy right away, though I hadn’t been a ‘renter’ since 1987. I had only known ‘rental’ from a landlord’s perspective, yet, here we were, the renters of a house I had found on Craigslist. When Les arrived, the landlord and neighbor, a teacher at the ASMS, greeted him with a group of students who would unload the truck. Afterward, our landlord/friend – who refuses to call us ‘tenants’ - took Les to Callahan’s Irish Pub for a burger and drink. The following day, Les went ‘yacht club hunting’ and discovered yet, another one, the Buccaneer Yacht Club. Literally, he had been in Mobile, a town in a state where we knew no one, for less than 24 hours when he began texting pictures of himself sailing on Mobile Bay with all of his new friends – who are still our friends! This was indicative of his next eight weeks. My next eight weeks, however, was one disaster after another!

The closing of my house fell through on closing day, thanks to my ‘Driveway Nazi’ who showed herself to the buyers that morning and caused them to back out of the deal. To make a long story short, the previous owners of my big, beautiful, Victorian house were run off by the Driveway Nazi, the next door neighbor girl who is about my age and still lives with her very wealthy parents. Yet they certainly did not mention her in the ‘property disclosure’ when I bought it! So now, five terrorizing years later, here I was, selling the house. Do you think I mentioned the Driveway Nazi in my disclosure? Not a snowball’s chance in hell! But Karma was soon to knock at my door when the buyers – who held the house hostage for the past 5 months – met the Driveway Nazi the morning of the scheduled closing and the deal came to a screeching halt! The money they demanded I dump into the house the previous two weeks was no longer coming back in cash at the closing table because THERE WAS NO CLOSING!!! So here I was, the first two weeks after Les left, living in a vacant house, and the next six weeks in a cottage on Lake Ontario, without the money I had planned to live on during that time!

I've never been one to borrow from one account to pay for something else as that is only borrowing from the future. Therefore, I resorted to painting and cleaning properties owned by my dad and sister just to get by during that time so that I wouldn't have to take from otherwise allocated funds. For six weeks, I wore tattered work clothes and was filthy from sheet rock and sanding dust. Between jobs, I helped with pricing at my Dad’s ACE Hardware store. So, here I was, over 40, with an M.A. and working on a PH.D, yet, somehow catapulted back into my hometown as the sticker lady at Deaton's, while Les was floating around Mobile Bay on a sailboat!

To add salt to the wound of my deflated ego, my face decided that it was allergic to something and thought it would be cute to blow up like a fricking balloon, especially around my eyes, making me look like a distorted version of Frankenstein! My mom had always told me, “Never go out of the house not looking your best! If you do, you will run into all the people – particularly hot guys – that you haven’t seen in 10 years and you will look like hell!” Well, at this point, I didn’t have a choice and it wasn’t 10 years, it was more like 25 years and boy was she right!

It seemed that every time I went out, whether to the grocery store or simply to sit on the deck of the cottage, the hottest guys from my high school days would turn up. In the grocery store, I found myself taking sudden, sharp turns, hiding behind racks, and looking in the other direction pretending not to see people while at the same time, not letting them see my new ‘Frankensteiness’. At the cottage – which sits at the mouth where the Salmon River enters Lake Ontario, many people whom I would not have chosen to see this version of myself, floated by in sailboats every time I sat on the deck. I hadn’t been in town for well over 20 years, except for my previous class reunion, so it wasn’t like they would look at me and say, “Oh, what happened to you?” It was more likely, “Holy Crap! She looks like hell after all these years!”

Between the closing of my house falling through, and my face swelling, I began to wonder if there wasn’t a conspiracy to keep me in New York or, at the very least, make my last 8 weeks there a living hell, which it totally was! By the time Les flew back to drive us to Mobile at the end of June, I was like a caged prisoner making a run for it! Thus, began my escape, from as near as hell as I had ever been, to Mobile, Alabama!