Here I am already at 80 when I only expected that to be a limit and instead it seems to be a crisis point, a turning point, but not quite there yet. Some mornings I wake up thinking I’m 90.
Last year the weeds in the backyard were up to my knees and I pulled them up one after the other. This year the same weeds — I don’t know what they are except that they have yellow heads and make aerial seed globes like dandelions — are up to my shoulders. I shall begin pulling them up, but it’s the work of days.
At the same time little proto trees have reached up far in excess of their former height, which suggested shrubs. In one way I’m very pleased because they make a barrier against my transgressive neighbors and even obscure the view from the alley that would have pleased a sniper focused on my back bedroom window where I type. (Such a thought is a premise of the times.) But I just gave an experimental try to the thicket growing up in front of my kitchen window and discovered my tools have rusted over the winter. It will take a bit of work with steel wood, WD40 and a pumice stone to get them working properly.
In the meantime, coffee.
The real problem is the roof. Hail last year pounded some shakes to bits but this spring a branch reached far enough over to scrape a hole. I’m now beginning to explore the wonderful world of roof finance which is crowded with other people more prosperous than myself. My advantage is that I own the house and have a good credit rating. I can’t decide whether it’s an advantage to be female or not. Generally, men are expected to deal with financial stuff except that here it is often women who keep the ranch books. Some tradesmen are patronizing and even dictatorial in spite of me holding the check book. Others are full of pity for what they perceive is a helpless old lady out of work.
Though I’ve been here twenty years and have a long history back to 1961 just north of here, some tradespeople consider me an outsider, fair game for running a scam. In fact, there was some of that when it came to buying this house. In small ways the property was misrepresented. Every appliance from washing machine to stove was inoperable or on the edge. I’ve just now paid off the $800 bill for replacing the kitchen sink drain.
But this house dropped on me by surprise. I had not expected my mother’s bequest to pay for a house. I had thought a book contract might do the job, or I’d just go on renting shacks. Still, I was able to make a list of what I wanted, about 75 desiderata like location, everything being on the first floor, and so on. I could see by looking at the mudhole basement, just pumped out from the latest break in the plumbing due to severe cold in March, that if I consulted an assessor, he would recommend against it.
There were twelve houses for $30,000 and the others were smaller, farther from the post office and grocery store (those were on the list), and had no trees. Anyway, a professional evaluator in my earlier Montana congregation had sworn there was no such thing as an assessor who was not bought out by realtors and bankers.
One of the major features of money in the US is how much of it is anchored and secured by buildings. Even the high rollers in the corruption world are likely to be in real estate like Trump. Over the years the plain idea of loaning advance money to be paid off by profit — which was the original notion — has become encrusted with strategies and bamboozles.
“Bundling” houses for investment is one I ran across. It listed a house across our back fence in Portland as an “improved” house with a swimming pool. The reality was a Depression-era house with a swimming pool that took up the whole backyard, because the dynamic Black woman who lived there rightly figured it would keep her kids home and out of gangs. She worked three jobs to pay it off.
I had a friend who inherited a pile of gold bars! The ultimate investment, except that diamonds are more portable. He was urged to put the gold in the vault of the bank, which he did. In a little while they began to urge him to convert them to cash so he could speculate and reap big rewards in terms of investment.
When I bought this house outright, people urged me to use it for capital to buy a second house, which I could buy, improve and “flip,” thus doubling my money. There were other people who cautioned me that the village was collapsing and shrinking so fast that I would never be able to sell this house. The demographic is mostly defensive old white ranching and farming people, but 30% defined themselves as American Indian in the last survey. You would not be able to tell by looking at the houses. Now the urban coastal are moving in and you can tell their houses by driving by.
There have been “for sale” signs all over town and now there are “sold” signs. I was late realizing that these were not outright purchases but contract arrangements, very much entailed and not thought of as “forever homes.” The news claims that people are leaving the cities as dangerous and trying to move to small towns they assume are safe. I daresay they are acting on illusions.
They may be disillusioned and move on in a few years. Few of them think about infrastructure or the difficulty of entering into the social webwork of people who have known each other for generations. A year from now this town may be very different. It has already changed from what it was twenty years ago, when I came. Individuals in a small place have a major impact. When one dies, a little part of the structure collapses. Maybe it's only a waitress.
After I’d been here a while, two older men asked me out for lunch. They were about to retire. Both loved history and they had formed a pact to meet once a month to visit and think about an historic place. History abounds here but not like the event’s back east which are mostly designated buildings. Here they tend to be people. So I was the designated historic “place” this time and they thoroughly interrogated me about the Sixties in Browning with Bob Scriver. They are gone now. Few if any of the residents know who Bob Scriver was and they are almost afraid to drive through Browning. Bob’s little empire is pretty much dismantled. All over the planet the statues are coming down. Nothing is sacred or permanent.
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