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childhood home video conference
Thursday, March 20 2025
location: the couch in the Shaque, Stingy Hollow Road, rural Augusta County, VA
Before I could do much of anything this morning, I needed to eat, and I was out of the foods I'd brought with me from Hurley. So I drove into Staunton and to get some provisions. It was before 9:00am at the time and the sun (which rises later in this western part of timezone) had yet to produce the thermals that vultures depend on to soar. I saw a few vultures trying to get started on their day, including one with a missing feather doing his or her best over the intersection of Statler Blvd. and Greenville Avenue. But the air was so still that the vultures had to periodically flap their wings, something you don't often see.
I drove to the Kroger in Statler Square and shopped for groceries among the other early birds. Today I didn't much care about nutritional value; I mostly wanted to have things that could be kept at room temperature and be easily turned into consumable foods. So I got a jar of peanut butter, a couple loaves of bread, a couple bags of tostadas, and a bunch of bananas. So I wouldn't have to just eat peanut butter sandwiches, I also got a packet of Tofurky sandwich "meat," a head of butter lettuce, and a squeezable bottle of Grey Poupon mustard. I also got two different salsas, one of which required refrigeration.
After eating several peanut butter sandwiches, I resumed work cleaning up the Shaque. Most of the books were gone and my effort shifted to attacking two of my mother's middens, one beneath the "tea shelf" in the Shaque's western corner, and one along the southwest wall, concentrated around an old masonite television console that I'd long ago removed the guts from and made into a reasonably-functional desk. (I'd originally added it as a second desk in the Shaque so someone could use one of my Macintosh SEs while someone else was using the more-powerful — and color-capable — IIsi on the built-in desk in the Shaque's northeast corner.) These middens consisted of interleaved layers of framed art, half-finished paintings on canvas (some of which, on the bottom, were ones I'd painted), linoleum blocks, newspapers, catalogs, horse magazines, and envelopes of information about various investments. There were few treasures in these piles, though occasionally I'd find a mostly-full tube of acrylic paint, a heavy-duty stapler, a multi-tool, or unused canvases. There was also a fair amount of framing supplies and picture-hanging hardware, so it's doubtful I'll ever need to buy another small eye screw.
Once I had most of the middens packed into trash bags, I brought over an extremely powerful shopvac from Creekside and used it to slurp up the dirt, dust, and numerous mouse turds. It's doubtful anyone had used a vacuum in the Shaque since I'd been living there in the mid 1990s. (There are at least three vacuum cleaners at Creekside, one still unopened in a box shipped from Lowes.) The Shaque appears to still be mouse-proof after over 35 years, but in recent decades people have occasionally left the door open and then forget about bags of honey comb or food, which gave mice what they needed to thrive. (I was likely one of the people who accidentally left food in the Shaque, probably back in July, though I always made sure to close the door completely.)
Joy Tarder, my mother's former power-of-attorney and the person overseeing the disposition of her estate, came by to visit this afternoon soon after I'd one my first round of vacuuming in the Shaque. She sat on the couch and gave me various documents I needed, such as death certificates for my mother and father and details about my brother Don's special needs trust. Joy said things would probably work best for Don and his trust if I became his power of attorney. All I would have to do was create the document online and take it to a notary public and get Don to sign it in front of that person. She also suggested I create and administer a second special needs trust to deal with the torrent of money now flowing into Don's accounts. For some reason Joy had also bought Don and me separate Husky tool kits, things she got for cheap but that neither of us actually need. Again, it seemed like she was looking for some way to spend down some mysterious source of money. She'd also brought a painting that my parents had bought from a street artist named Wadsworth Jarrell in Chicago back in the 60s, an artist who had gone on to become famous. I'd looked for that painting as one of the few items of value in the ruins of my childhood home and hadn't seen it. Then Don had asked Joy about it and it turned out she had it for some reason. Hmm. In any case, now it was being turned over to me.
Later this evening, while it was dusk back in Hurley and still much brighter in the Shenandoah Valley, our friend Fern stopped by the Hurley house to visit Gretchen and she and Gretchen ended up having a video chat with me. I used my phone as a hotspot and the camera on my laptop to give them both a tour of the Shaque, the goat pasture, my abandoned childhood home, and the trailer at Creekside, where Don interrogated Fern about her recently getting a PhD in anthropology. (I'd mentioned Fern to Don in the past, and he'd immediately perked up, since she is an unmarried woman who might possibly be attractive, age differences be damned.) Of course, Don being Don, he expressed disappointment that Fern's anthropology education hadn't included much biology, and then he tried to wow her with some irrelevant information he'd recently learned about spider venom or something. Eventually Gretchen signaled she at least had had enough, so I took the video chat back to the Shaque and ended it there.
Temperatures had reached the upper 70s yesterday and low 70s today, but by this evening as I walked around barefoot showing Gretchen and Fern my childhood home, I could feel it getting colder. But the spring peepers are peeping aggressively and birds are staking out and defending territories.
My father had these boxes of geological samples shipped to my childhood home circa 1976. Note the NASA logo, which famously unnerved a plumber working in our basement. He might've feared the boxes contained space aliens. I figured that if my father wanted them in Staunton, I should keep them in the family by storing them under Dons's Creekside trailer, since the basement of my childhood home (where they had been) will soon be obliterated. So I used one of Don's wagons to move them. Click to enlarge.
An incomplete drawing of a rooster that I found in the Shaque. Click to enlarge.
The mostly-clean Shaque interior, looking southwest. Click to enlarge.
The mostly-clean Shaque interior, looking northeast. Click to enlarge.
Radio-frequency shielding that I built into the underside of the the Shaque's built-in desk. Click to enlarge.
Charlotte, Gretchen, Neville, and Fern videoconferencing with me in the Shaque this evening. Click to enlarge.
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