Husband

This is the sort of man I am married to: He hates to kill things. He is not a hunter, but it goes much further than just not owning guns and shooting deer or birds or lions or tigers or bears, oh my. He doesn’t like to kill anything and this can sometimes lead to problems in our marriage, because there are a few things I don’t mind seeing killed – like spiders and mice and (ugh!) cockroaches. He is the person who will take a spider outside to freedom rather than kill it. I am the person who will step on it faster than you can say, “Oh – my – God – is – that – a – spider – about – to – land – on – your – head.”

We recently moved to a new (old) house and I hired an exterminator ten seconds after I saw the first roach (albeit, dead) in the house. The cockroaches in my new town are apparently a different breed of roaches than I’m used to and I was not about to encounter one of the huge things alive. The nice man came out immediately and sprayed the house and voila – I haven’t seen a roach, dead or alive, since. (I’m sure I will develop some heinous carcinogen-related illness as a result of this someday, but at present I’ll take that over vermin in my home.)

I don’t think mice are susceptible to the bug man’s bag of tricks. I found a mouse in the sink drain of the guest apartment and pretty much went ballistic, so much so that my husband had to take the plumbing apart which led to a myriad of issues in our 75-year old house. But, alas, problem solved. Or was it? One can never be too sure when it comes to mice, so I did the unthinkable (in my husband’s book) – I bought glue traps and put them under cabinets and in closets. My husband hates glue traps, thinks they are cruel and inhumane. I couldn’t care less about the suffering of a rodent. I’m sure that makes me a horrible person and I will probably come back in my next life as a mouse and get stuck on a glue trap and die a horrible death, but for this life I’m killing the little bastards any way I can.

Yesterday, before we left on our vacation, I went to the guest apartment closet to get an ice chest and there on the aforementioned glue trap was a huge lizard, not a vile mouse, but a big brown and white lizard. Oh dear God, what have I done? I like lizards. I wouldn’t wish this kind of death on a lizard. The glue trap was specifically put there for a monstrous mouse, not a sweet lizard. Now I had to face the reckoning. I had to tell my husband that a.) I had put out glue traps and b.) I had imposed a horrific death upon an innocent lizard. I passed him in the hall, shuddered, and said, with tears in my voice, “Go look in the guest house closet.” I was ashamed of myself.

My husband was gone for a long time. What was he doing out there? Could he be holding a burial ceremony for the lizard? Could he be calling a divorce attorney? Could he be giving the lizard mouth-to-mouth resuscitation? When he finally came into the house I meekly asked and found out the lizard was still alive and my wonderful and caring husband had freed it from the glue trap. How in the hell can one free anything from a glue trap, I stepped on one once and almost had to throw away my shoe. But patient and diligent and not willing to let the lizard die, my husband worked gingerly until he freed the little guy.

Was my husband upset with me for setting out the glue traps? Nope, how can a guy who won’t kill a spider and spends hours setting free a lizard be mad at his wife? I sure married a great man, even if he won’t kill bugs for me.

The Estate Sale

Another chapter in my life has come to an end – the closing up of my dear grandmother’s house. This past weekend we held Big Red’s estate sale and it wasn’t at all what I expected. I was dreading having strangers in her home picking through her things, but amazingly it turned into a nice experience.

A funny thing happened. A lot of people came to the sale and just stayed – they stayed to hear about Big Red. Who was this woman who quilted and tatted and knitted and loved books and did calligraphy and had a green thumb and collected stamps and made porcelain dolls and painted ceramics and baked bread and taught school and raised ten children and lived to 104 years old and had 104 progeny and collected rocks and pottery shards and driftwood and loved cowboy lore and poetry and owned every Weight Watcher cookbook and had a great record collection and costumes and vintage hats and an aquarium for a boa constrictor? Who was this woman?

And, what a great house. Yes, I can see that it hasn’t been updated since 1953, but what a great vibe it has. Good bones. I’ve never seen a bathroom (kitchen, living room) this large. I love the original linoleum. She raised how many kids here?

As the day progressed the estate sale bargain hunters became our new friends. As we told the history of the antique trunks and the dining room table we found the people we wanted to be the new owners our grandmother’s things. The young couple who bought the claw-foot iron bathtub and so many books, the university graduate student and her husband who came back on the second day and were thrilled to take home the Robert Wood print for half price and the man who bought the antique sewing machine because his family had one just like it that had been lost in a fire.

While we told the story of our Big Red and sold the household goods already picked over by her family and friends we silently wished for the love, happiness and good karma certainly contained within her “stuff” to follow their new owners. I think Big Red would have been pleased.