Neighbors

My uncle Charles is, as he describes himself, an entrepreneur, but really what he does is pick up junk and make money from it. He is an incredibly useful person to know, particularly when you're starting on a venture like ours. Things appear in between visits: the big, almost new gas grill; a 42" HDTV; buckets of paint. Aunt Carol wrote to us a few weeks ago to tell us that Charles had procured a portable office, and we immediately thought "Classroom!"

Once we made the decision to move, we thought we'd pack up the storage unit and bring those things to Pepperwood, and the first three-day weekend we could, we rented a Uhaul and loaded up. It's been wet this winter, very wet, and we haven't had the driveways graveled for years. The day we cleaned out the storage unit, Carol called to tell us they'd tried to put the trailer in, and had gotten stuck. Didn't know if we could get a 17' Uhaul past it. Do we wait and pay another almost $200 for storage, or do we go for it? We went for it. We arrived in Pepperwood about 10 PM that night. The Prius went over the mud ruts handily, but when the Uhaul hit them, it stopped moving. Jay wisely stopped before it could get truly stuck, we locked the truck and went to bed.

The next day found more rain, but intermittent, so we unloaded our boxes into the still-stuck portable, got the Uhaul out of the mud, and settled in for the afternoon. At some point, I looked down the lane from the kitchen window and saw three men walking around the end of the portable. We three walked down to see what was going on. and it turned out that our neighbors had seen the portable get stuck, so they came over to see what they could do to get it out of the lane for us. Unbidden. This is the kind of folk we'll be living amongst.

And so it begins...

The property at Pepperwood has been owned by the Russells for at least 60 years. There were 8 Russell children who lived there, and both my grandparents were there up until days before they died, so of course we're working carefully around nostalgic notions while starting to conceive of the land and home as our own.

The other day, right after our last visit, I was talking with my mom (number 6 of 8) about what we were planning to do before we move in, and I mentioned painting the interior of the house. On one wall in the living room, opposite the beautiful big windows that face west, the wall is yellow, and there is a painting of a weeping willow that curves up and over toward the doorway into the kitchen. It's been there my whole life, I imagine, which means that the living room hasn't been painted in almost 40 years. It looks pretty good, given that (hey, I look pretty good for almost 40 too!), but it really does need to be repainted. My mom's first response: "You can't paint over the tree!" And we smack run into the first of what I anticipate will be many (hopefully) gentle conversations about what we can (should, would) preserve and what must (should, wants to be) changed.