It's always something

After Mr. Abby failed to leave on Saturday, we decided to go out and celebrate Cinco De Mayo in a suitably...rowdy fashion. A good time was had by all.

Sunday morning found us bleary-eyed and whining. What sounded good, thought Mr. Abby, was a nice cold Gatorade. So he grabbed a couple out of the fridge...and they were piss-warm.

The refrigerator has been getting wobby the last few weeks. It's a re-conditioned mosel we bought last summer when the World's Most Disgusting Fridge (provided by the landlord) went tits-up in a foul puddle of rusty water.

So we spent yesterday afternoon/evening hunting down the World's Cheapest Used Refrigerator from the classifieds. And picking it up. And driving it home. And removing doors and shuffling fridges. All while hungover. And it was hot. And the A/C is out in Mr. Abby's pickup.

Ugh.

So it's ugly. And it's old. But it's reasonably clean (let's hear it for BLEACH!), and it seems to be functional.

All I need is...22 days. Well, Mr. Abby will be here, so we really need about 54 days.

Now I have Dead Fridge in the back of Mr. Abby's truck, and he took my Jeep to work. I have to figure out how to get rid of the damn thing, which will require phone calls to the Tampa Department of Shit You Want to Get Rid Of. I will have to get a Voucher. Then I will have to take it to the Designated Solid Waste Big Stuff Place. And I will wait in line, and fill out Papers.

You know, when I was a little kid out in the boondocks, we didn't have trash pickup. We had a dump. And a burning barrel. Dad burned the household trash, and when the barrel was full, we'd drive it and whatever large crap we had to the dump. We usually used the tractor and trailer, as Dad and Grampa had long ago cut a tractor trail that connected our property to the dump.

The dump was in the woods, on some land owned by a relative. I could cut through the woods just south of the it and end up at my grandparents' house. I did that a lot.

The distant relative sold the land. There's a fairly high-dollar housing development on it now, named Fox Run Rolling Hills or something equally stupid. The homeowners there are easy to spot, since they're the ones driving their nice shiny cars 5 miles an hour on the dirt road so as not to raise dust.

My Grampa died, and Gramma moved to an apartment in town. Their old house has been demolished. But my Aunt and her husband live on the property in a house they built. My other Aunt and her husband live on the hill next door, in a house they built. You don't even have to walk up the road to get from one house to the other, because years ago my Grampa built a huge set of stone steps going up the hill, with stone terraced gardens on the bank between the steps and the road. That's all overgrown with the wild pea plants he planted, but the steps are still there.

The folks in the housing development live on top of our old family dump. They get stuck in the snow all winter long because the dirt roads are way down on the county's plowing list. They spend the month of November cringing in terror, because my family and our old neighbors never got on board with civilization coming to Irving Township, and continue to chase whitetail deer where they always have.

We did make a family concession when Gramma moved to town, and it's no longer a ritual for everyone who gets a deer to take it over there and hang it from the clothesline pole.

The relative I mentioned a few posts ago, my Dad's cousin, who used to own the dump property and lost most of it in a divorce, staged his great standoff with the Michigan State Police from the front door of his trailer on the couple acres he retained. His daughter and her retarded son live on the same couple of acres, in a small and tidy trailer that the police do not visit.

Sometimes I miss "home," but mostly the home I remember, not the home that's there now. Except when I have a refrigerator to get rid of, and as I navigate phone trees and dicker with civil servants, I can only dream of put-putting out in the woods with the tractor and just leaving it at the dump.