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Eileen and her human circus
Wednesday, August 4 2021
At the end of the workday, I drove the Subaru out to Home Depot on the way to the Brewster Street house to return things I hadn't used or that hadn't fit. I've noticed we're back to most people wearing masks again, likely because of concerns about the Delta variant of the coronavirus. I still go into stores unmasked, but I've been thinking it might be good to go back to better protecting my lungs.
Out at the house, my first task was to mow the grass, starting in the front yard and then moving to the back. I'd brought a weed wacker, since that's the easiest mowing device to carry and the former tenant had stolen the house's mower. I was pretty thorough with the front yard but worked more loosely in the back, leaving lots of weeds and tree seedlings standing along the fences on either side. There are a lot of baby trees of heaven back there, the children of a massive such tree in the way back.
One of the other homeowners on the street, an older long-time resident, had been chatting with Gretchen yesterday, and he chatted a little with me today. He owns a house on the northwest corner of Levan and Brewster that contains a group of squatters who have been there for over a year, none of them paying rent. The guy said something about "the crazies" in Washington who had just extended the pandemic eviction moratorium, which was making it impossible for him to replace the existing squatters with someone willing to pay rent. I could understand his frustration; hell, if I was in his situation, I'd be incensed about the eviction moratorium too. Gretchen and I are irate that Eileen Peppers won't pay the more than $1000 water bill she ran up filling her unapproved swimming pool with a garden hose, but at least that's something that fits in a security deposit. This guy said his squatters owe him over $100,000. Later I looked over at his house and saw various things piled up around it. Then I saw a squirrelly guy and his son going into the house. Those were, I immediately recognized, the two people whom I'd seen come over to our Brewster Street house the other day to gather some of Eileen Peppers' possessions, and I know that kid (at least) had actually been living with Eileen. Evidently now that Eileen can no longer provide a roof over his head, he's forced to live with the squatters. Perhaps that kid's father always had. Come to think of it, I'd heard that some man in his 30s had been dating Eileen's teenage special-needs daughter and Eileen had decided to look after that man's son (probably as an added income stream). This was all coming together in my head, and I realized we'd really dodged a bullet just by getting Eileen and her human circus to move out of our house. That they'd left bills and trash for us to deal with is a relatively mild annoyance compared to what could've been.
Other things I did out at the Brewster Street house included changing out the last of the deadbolts, an important precaution given all the marginal people Eileen might've given keys to. I also replaced all the ugly gold-colored doorknobs on the second floor with nickel-colored ones. Meanwhile Eric was there doing more second-floor painting and occasionally chatting with me. I kept expecting Gretchen to show up, but she never did and apparently never intended to.
Back at the house, she'd made a gingery Asian noodle dish containing peanuts, tempeh, and very tough kale.
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