14 August 2011

Living the Dream

It was sold as a 3-bedroom double-wide manufactured home, but let’s face it, we were living in a trailer. The walls were paper thin and there was never a moment when I didn’t know which room D was in. We could practically hear each other breathing from any room in the house. One night we were awakened by a critter chewing on something in the ceiling above our heads. Its snack kept slipping and rolling away, and the animal chased after it, all night long. The first time I turned on the heater, I heard whistling under my feet and discovered that the carpet had been tacked down right over a heater vent. Why bother to cut out those pesky rectangles when the heat will blow right through the carpet, anyway?

So I did what came naturally under the circumstances. I bought some baby chicks and set them up in a box in the family room. They were messy and stinky but oh, so cute. Every morning they’d greet me with hungry peeps, and every night they fell asleep huddled together in a corner. 

At four weeks old, they were big enough to move outside into the coop. But I didn’t realize that they were still small enough to squeeze through the holes in the chicken wire. All those feathers were deceiving. A few days later I noticed a chick on the ground outside the coop, not moving. I looked around and saw two more chicks lying in the driveway. And then I spotted two scrub jays inside the coop, eating from the chicken feeder. As I approached, the jays slipped through the wire and flew away. 

Jays are territorial gangsters. From what I could gather, they had entered the coop and chased the chicks out, then pecked them to death so they could have the food all to themselves. It was a gruesome scene. But shortly thereafter, West Nile Virus reared its head and nearly wiped out all the jays in the neighborhood. Karma? You be the judge.

07 August 2011

In The Beginning

So I was saying.

As D settled into his new surroundings, the stories kept coming. There was the time he wandered onto a neighboring property and got chased down by a man in a truck waving a shotgun. Then he discovered a rat living in his oven (I try not to think about it). There were freezing winters with no heat, 100-year floods, and an evacuation by the National Guard. Did I mention the rat in the oven? Finally, after five years of roughing it indoors, D bought a mandarin orchard and happily got back to his farming roots.

Meanwhile, I blandly pushed paper in my sterile downtown office and wondered if I would ever see any of the conservation I was supposedly working on. So I set my sights on finding a job in the field, away from the city. No matter that I knew diddly squat about botany or habitat restoration or hydrologic geomorphology. I was going to be one with nature, dammit. Word reached a manager in northern Northern California who needed an Operations Manager, and suddenly I was moving.

Well, it just so happened that I landed in the same town where D was living. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence but a mixture of fate and a matchmaking manager. Whatever it was, if you asked me, it was all about the JOB. And I lived stubbornly on my own for all of a few months before moving into D’s house. So much for being an independent woman.