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Thai food and a toilet repair
Tuesday, March 18 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
Despite having taken 150 milligrams of diphenhydramine last night, I slept poorly. I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep until I'd drunk some more wine from the box. When I eventually fell asleep, I didn't wake up until after 9:00am. I heard my phone buzzing because Don was trying to call me, though not because he had anything to say. I eventually wandered over to his trailer to make myself a cup of tea using his weak-ass microwave.
Back in the Shaque, a female cardinal kept returning to the south-east window to gently peck at her reflection, a mild form of a behavior my father and I used to refer to whimsically as "turtling." When I'd go into the honey house to see what additional treasures I could find in its attic, I'd often see a bright red male cardinal turtling, this time with considerably more effort) against its northwest window. I'd seen two male cardinals at the same time in the area between the honey house and the Shaque, so it's possible there is a real territorial frontier passing through that area.
I eventually drove into town to accomplish two things. I needed to buy myself some sort of easy-to-consume food, and I needed to buy stuff at Lowes to repair Don's favorite toilet and to also aid in preparing the Shaque for relocation, should that be a possibility. So I drove directly to Thai Staunton Restaurant and ordered a couple curries containing vegetables and tofu and then went to Lowes while they prepared it. Whenever I am in Staunton at a place like Lowes, I am struck by the folksy southern friendliness of the employees. Employees are friendly in New York too, but it's a different, less-folksy kind. As I was checking out today, the woman stationed at the self-checkout to prevent theft noticed that I'd totally forgotten to scan or take a pack of 7.5 inch abrasive wheels for cutting metal with a skilsaw. Label-down, it had looked like part of the self-checkout equipment. I thanked her for her unctuous concern and returned to my vehicle. After retrieving my Thai food, I had to go to two different gas stations on Greenville Road before I found one with coffee.
I drove back to my childhood home via Greenville Road. As I passed the Augusta Petroleum Cooperative, I could see massive plumes of smoke rising from the forests of the Blue Ridge. It looked apocalyptic. Then I saw another unsettling thing: a confederate flag flying from a flagpole attached to the husk of an old pickup truck decoratively placed in someone's front yard across Greenville Road from its intersection with Cochrans Mill Road.
Back at Creekside, I gobbled up my Thai food and then went to fix the toilet that Don likes to use in his Creekside trailer. A couple weeks ago it had started leaking for reasons my brother doesn't have enough mechanical intuition to understand, and he'd called the neighbor over, who had shut the toilet valve off. Yesterday I'd turned that valve back on and realized the problem was that the tank valve no longer shuts off the water, so it was overflowing the tank. To fix it, I only needed to install a new tank valve. The old one was caked in lime deposits (the same material that stalactites are made of), the inevitable result of pumping water up out of a well drilled in limestone.
I'd begun the process of emptying out the heavier stuff in the Shaque, starting with a fairly comprehensive collection of old National Geographic Magazines dating from the 1920s to the 1990s that I'd placed on a high shelf ringing the top of the main space of the Shaque. In between carrying armloads of this across the road to eventually stash underneath Don's trailer, I'd occasionally go into the trailer to poke around. One thing I noticed was a perfectly good-looking bicycle in the room that Don now uses as a bedroom. I asked Don about it and he said the tires were flat. But of course they were flat; the bike had belonged to our mother, who hadn't been on that bike for at least the two years she'd been in the nursing home and probably a good number of years before that. So I went back to the abandoned chaos of our childhood home, where I eventually found a pedal-powered bicycle pump, but it was missing an essential nut that attached its piston to the frame. Evidently that nut was metric, and the only nuts I could find in the nearby cans of random hardware were imperial. But a couple such nuts could be threaded some distance onto where the nut was needed, and, with a little super glue, such nuts were sufficient to get the pump working. Soon I had air in the bike's tires, but then there was the problem that the stem was a bit loose in the fork, and there were no allen wrenches to tighten it. (I'd taken all such wrenches back to Hurley, assuming there would never be a bike to work on at Creekside.) Using a pair of needle-nosed pliers, I was able to reach into the place where an allen wrench goes and torque it somewhat. At that point I decided the bike was good enough for Don to ride. As I presented it to him, I asked him if he knew what "learned helplessness" is. I said that his not doing the little required to get this bike working, which would've greatly improved his lifestyle (one where getting to town requires walking six miles), reflected learned helplessness. I also stressed to him the importance of locking this bike if he starts using it to go to town. (Decades ago, he used to regularly use a bike to ride to town. But inevitably he left it unlocked, it was stolen, and he's never had a bicycle since.)
At some point in all this, I heard the call of a phoebe, which I hadn't heard yesterday. Evidently they arrive in Staunton at least five days before they reach Hurley (which they usually do on March 23rd).
Amongst the completely worthless crap I was removing from the Shaque included a whole series of tech books For Dummies that my mother had bought in the early naughties before realizing she was hopeless with computers. (She'd completely stopped sending me email by the time my father died in 2011.) All of these books were badly out of date and some might've referred to technologies that no longer even exist. I thought it would be fitting to sequester their carbon in the ground using the hole my brother (and then an excavator) had dug in the goat pasture in anticipation of a burial that my mother's corpse never actually experienced. So I carried an armload of these books to the edge of that hole and then tried to get down under a piece of plywood and some tattered tarps that had been used to line the hole. But so much erosion had taken place that the tarp and plywood could not be removed from the bottom of the hole. So sequestration dreams couldn't be realized. I ended up tossing the worthless books through a gap in the planks of the old chicken shed, which, while collapsing, is still mostly intact twenty or so years since a chicken actually lived in it.
My wrestling with the tarp and plywood in my mother's unused final resting place had gotten clay all over my pants and shirt, so I went down to the floodplain field and washed off in the creek.
In other news today, Gretchen sent word from Hurley that the recruiters who'd found me the job I will soon be starting had completed my background check, and everything was good. You never know about such things, and I never take them for granted. But after getting this news, I felt confident enough in my new job to announce it on Facebook, complete with a link to the video for Full Time Job by Squirrel Flower. It was actually YouTube randomly recommending that to me that made me think to post about my new job. I then wallowed in the excellence of the videos that YouTube went on to stream, which included a random selection of videos I'd liked in the past.
My brother Don in the chair where he spends the most time in the Creekside trailer living room. Click to enlarge.
Don's neurotic collection of new toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes, which he insists on keeping on counter space in his little kitchen (supposedly so that they will be exposed to air and so not harbor bacteria, which makes no sense at all). Click to enlarge.
The honey house (left) and remains of the old "carriage shed" (which my father insisted on calling it), viewed from the southeast. Click to enlarge.
The southwest wall of the honey house, viewed from inside, with some of my art that I am abandoning. Click to enlarge.
The northwest wall of the honey house, viewed from inside, with clutter that probably accumulated until around 2007 or so. Click to enlarge.
The rusty metal roof of my abandoned childhood home, viewed from the entrance deck of the Shaque. My father and I installed that roof back in the early 1980s and it is still sound. Click to enlarge.
The rarely-photographed northeast end of the Shaque, featuring its bunk window. Click to enlarge.
The southwest (front) end of the Shaque. Click to enlarge.
The view of the bunk window from inside the Shaque. Note the reflections from mirror glued to the cathedral ceiling. Click to enlarge.
The accumulated clutter in the Shaque around its north corner. Click to enlarge.
The accumulated clutter along the southeast wall of the Shaque. Click to enlarge.
A crazy painting I'd done at some point in the 1990s. Evidently I never considered it very good. Click to enlarge.
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