I’ve recently entered the early stages of middle age, but until recently I’ve never really felt like an adult. For the fourteen years we had been married, my husband Andrew and I were living in a house his grandparents bought and rented to us for peanuts. Until the pandemic, we lived paycheck to paycheck on my salary from working part-time and his SSI check (he’s legally blind). After I got stuck at home during lockdown, he discovered that Amazon, while being an evil conglomerate, is sometimes good to the differently-abled community. A year and a half later, he earned a promotion–in Kentucky. Two thousand miles away from our nest in California. Deciding that it was a chance we couldn’t pass up, we made plans to move. Across the country. In three weeks. Our original plan was that I stay with our three kids until the end of the school year, but Ubers are goddamned expensive. So we came too, which involved dropping our 12- and 9-year old into brand new schools in a brand new environment as well as hurriedly quitting my job.
Being the kind and generous people they are, Andrew’s grandmother lent out her husband to pitch in with driving to Kentucky, which was more financially feasible than flying. Naturally, he ended up doing 100% of the driving, while I snoozed and dominated the aux cable.
Andrew meanwhile had secured us a rental house and was staying there as we drove. That sounds awfully fast to get a house, you may be thinking. And that’s because our property management agency is garbage. The benefit of having a widely reviled rental company is that as long as you can do basic paperwork and prove you make three times the rent, you can stroll right on in. Unfortunately, the house we rented was tiny. Three bedrooms and a reasonably sized yard, but tiny. And the kitchen floor was seeping water. And the dishwasher was broken. And the heater was broken. And the hot water heater was broken. And there was a sizable leak in the ceiling, which over the course of a couple of days turned into a sizable hole in the ceiling. Of course we complained to the company, which took its sweet time fixing shit, even comping us a hotel room because March can be chilly in Kentucky, but eventually we had a dry kitchen floor, a working dishwasher, an extremely noisy heater that worked well in the front half of the house and almost adequately in the back, hot water, and a hastily patched ceiling.
And then, the bugs. The. Bugs. We get a break during cold weather, but woo-wee when spring comes around, look out! The mosquitoes here are aggressive; they’ll swarm you during the day, even in the rain. Ants come en masse. And stinkbugs. If you’ve never met a stinkbug (I hadn’t, so I was googling every bug I saw for a while), they spray when threatened and spray when squished, which attracts more stinkbugs. But they actually have a pretty long fuse, so it’s generally possible to scoop them up and put them outside. I took to putting an empty yogurt tub on top of the refrigerator to capture stray bugs, which I needed pretty much every time I turned around.
By far, the most shocking were the webworms. They show up and virtually overnight create massive webs in trees. I came outside one morning to find what looked like from afar giant spiderwebs full of maggots. I googled it and calmed down when I discovered they don’t hurt anything and head out when they’re done chilling in your tree. But seriously, this is what they look like. They’re nightmare fuel.
All the adjustments plus the emotional and financial burden of relocating across the country had me in a bad way. Back before the move, I had become enamored of a song by The Mountain Goats called “This Year”, which includes the lyrics, “I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me.” This was my mantra, and it got me through. (Now, we’re much more stable, with a much better house, and I have a full-time library job, something I struggled to get for seven years in California and never succeeded.)
Some time later, I was browsing e-books and came across Devil House by John Darnielle, and was intrigued. I loved it, and when I went to follow him on Goodreads I found out that he’s in The Mountain Goats. The singer/songwriter of the song that gave me hope is also a fantastic novelist! Here’s the Book Quote of the Day:
“I try to honor the dead in my books. It’s one of the things, I hope, that sets me apart a little from my partners in true crime. When I read what others write about places where the unthinkable became real, the focus always seems off to me. Victims spend their entire time in the spotlight just waiting for the fatal blow, on a conveyor belt that leads to the guillotine; I pity their fates, but it’s hard to grieve for them, because the treadmill on which they ran feels specifically designed to kill them.”
In a show of unfair levels of talent, Darnielle also reads his own audiobooks, and they’re amazing. I failed to find a good clip on YouTube, so you’ll just have to find out for yourself. Enjoy!
GhoulieJoe 