Chapter Three: Home - The One Place They Have to Let You In​​​

     

     Home, in our case meant a quiet three-bedroom colonial in the Cleveland suburb of South Euclid. It was a house Alma and I had purchased just six months before Emily was born after Alma fell in love with our colonial’s giant bay window.

 

     Beyond the window, our house was highlighted by creaky but natural wood flooring in the dining and living rooms, that flooring surrounded by foot-tall plank baseboards installed by the previous owner after what had to be a very severe bender. Replacing those baseboards was our first repair after moving into our home; the job motivated as much by our sense of smell as any attempt at architectural renovation.

 

     On our first walkthrough with the realtor, Alma and I noticed an ammonia odor that seemed to come from every corner of the first floor. Feigning a hearing impairment, our real estate agent made a valiant attempt at misdirection.

 

     “I don’t smell a thing. By the way, did you notice those hardwood floors?  You won’t find that in more modern homes.”

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     After some persistence, we discovered the house was condemned some thirty years prior by South Euclid animal welfare. Upon further questioning and some not-so-veiled legal threats, we learned the woman who owned the house had used it as a feline hotel of sorts, her client list eventually growing to more than forty cats. Forced to cope with only one litter box, those cats took a particular liking to the wooden plank baseboards.

 

     If the baseboards were a fixable problem, our so-so finances made our home’s ancient furnace a tolerable one, though some days barely so. When fully engaged, our radiators creaked, groaned, and occasionally uttered sounds for which there was no known equivalent in the English language.

 

     More attuned than I to our furnace’s mechanical vernacular, Alma woke up early one December morning and swore she could hear it cursing. We grew more dependent on our furnace’s many moods that first winter, our home shifting from sauna to icebox on an almost daily basis.                    

 

     With furnace issues in mind, we set up Emily’s nursery in the small bedroom just down the hall from our own.  For reasons unknown to Alma and me, the room was the only one in our home with a consistent temperature. One day as we were painting, Alma found a small Celtic cross etched in the ceiling above the nursery’s small closet.

 

     “Do you suppose,” Alma asked, “the original owners knew something after all?”

 

     “I don’t care who or what they knew. I’m just wondering if we could put one in every room in the house.”

 

     Before Jack’s birth, we purchased a wooden “big girl bed” for Emily and placed it in our home’s remaining open bedroom. Having devoted her every crib moment to figuring out methods of escape, Emily decided she loved the bed as well as her newer, larger room. That feeling lasted until bedtime.

 

     The cries woke us up at 2:00, 3:30, and 5:00, their crescendo reaching a pitch well beyond the normal human vocal range.

 

     “If she keeps this up,” I said to Alma, “the neighbors will think we’re conducting an exorcism.”

 

     “If she keeps this up,” Alma responded wearily, “the neighbors might join in.”

 

     Broken only when Alma and I took turns sleeping on Emily’s floor, the high-decibel shrieking ended after three increasingly neurotic weeks. In the imperious tone possessed only by children and Catholic nuns, Emily then declared she would no longer be needing our night-time services.

 

     Alma and I stayed awake the next several nights, but Emily was as good as her word – the crisis, it appeared, was over. The problem, Emily later told us, was the large black bear living deep inside her closet. Being a practical child, Emily eventually spoke to and made peace with her nighttime predator. The treaty relieved all of us, likely the bear included.

 

     The great bear incident now resolved, Alma and I were free to redecorate what would now be Jack’s nursery. With the large number of trees surrounding our home, Alma insisted on a forest motif, a concept I greeted with no small concern.

 

     “A forest?  I would think after everything, you’d be worried about more bears.”

 

     “It’s not the bears that bother you,” Alma replied, “you just afraid it will somehow generate more leaves.”

 

     She wasn’t wrong. South Euclid city planners had seemingly designed the municipality with an equal number of trees to people, and our home was no exception. Alma thought the trees were charming. Alma did not have to rake.

 

     Some of our neighbors had found unique solutions to the clutter. Many didn’t rake at all, preferring to let the leaves collect and die on their lawns over winter. Taking note, I once suggested this to Alma.

 

     “Our daughter plays on that lawn, and our son will as well. You let those leaves pile up, and we’ll never find either one.”

 

     “That would improve the environmental impact, and just think of the reduction in our food budget.”

 

     Bob and Mike, or specifically Bob, inspired my next leaf-raking solution. One week after finishing Jack’s room redesign, I noticed Bob walking around the perimeter of his home, an intent look beneath his perpetually stubbled beard.

 

     The trek alone didn’t seem unusual. Ever fastidious about their yard, Bob and Mike walked the outskirts of their home several times a week searching for gophers and other rodents with the intensity of soldiers scanning for IEDs.

 

     If today’s trek was extraordinary, it was for what Bob was wearing. On his back, he was sporting an oddly-shaped grey and white backpack with what appeared to be small appendages. Taken together, the thing resembled a giant bloated gerbil with a four-foot hose attached.

 

     I knew Mike and Bob didn’t even own a dog, much less a gerbil of unusual proportions. My curiosity building, I found out the true purpose of Bob’s device without even having to ask. Watching out the window, I saw Bob flip a switch on the gerbil’s back. It was then I realized my error – Bob had purchased a leaf blower.

 

     The noise emitted by Bob’s gerbil-blower was deafening, comparable to standing next to a 747 on an airport runway. The effect on Bob’s yard was even more dramatic.

 

     Everywhere Bob pointed his massive gerbil-blower, his now-cowed leaves moved meekly into a pile as if called to order by some all-powerful leaf God. The foliage brave enough to hide within Bob’s trees soon learned the error of its ways, falling to the ground as if shot by some gargantuan air cannon. Even the leaves on my own trees seemed to stand at attention, many falling on their own as if in sympathy for their next-door brethren.

 

     Being a guy, I was fascinated. Being a suburban guy, I wanted a gerbil-blower for my very own. After complimenting Bob on his leaf-blowing skills, I tried to sell Alma on my proposed purchase.

 

     “Are you insane?  That thing sounded like a jackhammer. I closed all our windows, and it still made the house vibrate. You get one of those machines, and our daughter will never go outside again.”

I

     looked in at Emily, seemingly unfazed, watching Aladdin in our TV room. “The electric can opener makes our house vibrate, and we both know our daughter can make more noise than that herself when she chooses to.”

 

     My logic fell on deaf ears. I was limited to raking leaves in the manner of my father, with a wooden rake and his impressively large collection of swear words. Raking and swearing, I convinced myself the exercise would help me keep up with our daughter and newborn son. Little did I know – even before Jack arrived, we had one more addition to our rapidly growing family.