Chapter 20
A Final Nest
At the beginning of October, roughly 12 years after my wife and me have moved into our first separate apartment, all the three of us moved out of it and took our new home. In a few days we became accustomed to it and it is a paradox, but true, although it was farther out of town than the apartment, both of us could reach our working place in a shorter time for a better communication.
The boy has been taken out of his school and registered in another not far from the house. After a neurotic form-master he has got a new one, also a woman, but a pragmatic type and he would never have problems stemming from human factors.
We have bought our house with a side-thought to make it possible to the parents of my wife to leave their partly sub-terrain home and live together with their daughter. Of course, for a long time it had been a topic of their family meetings, especially after his stroke for the water installation, but neither of their children would live together with them, only my wife forced it. May be, among all of them, only she had such a thing as empathy.
Our relatively late autumn moving postponed their coming to the next year. When we were settled in the house, their room emptied, even a big wardrobe we took together with the house, disassembled and stored in the shed, we called the former owner, a mason, and had him make an L-shaped wall, so as they do not have to have five doors on their room, only one – and the terrace door. It took about two weeks for the wall to dry out and I could paint it with whitewash from the side of the newly created corridor.
That day has also been one of the black ones in our life. It was a typical end-of-October Indian-summer day, about 80 degrees F. While I was preparing stuff for the mason – my working-holiday summers have been good trainings –, and he was laying the wall, my son went out with children from other houses of the street and rode his bicycle. Suddenly the daughter of our left-side rear neighbour ran to us and said:
"Uncle Joe, please, come. I think, Joe has broken his arm.”
She was right. He put up his feet on the hand-bar and crashed into a tree trunk. His fall was unlucky and his left lower arm became broken. He was not weeping – a brave 11-year-old –, but he was snow-white. I caught his arm cautiously and, pulling apart gently to prevent its shortening by instinctive pulling force of muscles, placed it Bonaparte-like into his shirt. I helped him to walk home, somebody from the right-side neighbour phoned for an ambulance. My wife took him to hospital, I had to stay home to finish work with the mason.
Late evening they came home, his arm in plaster-cast. The doctor asked them, who cared for his arm, they said, his father. He told them, it was the only clever thing, it prevented nerves to be damaged by the broken bone ends. For a short time my wife managed to look at me with respect – she has always been working in health service and the praise of a doctor is a great deed for her –, but, of course, she managed even quicker to forget it.
A relatively hard period followed, my first months in the new job on my working place and eliminating numerous small troubles with our new home.
Funniest of these malfunctions have been stairs to the basement. There was a makeshift roof above them designed for the height of the builder, i.e. five feet four inches. Every time I went down I hit my head. And the roof could save you from rain only, but rainwater from other places found its way all right to the stairs and step by step to basement. He forgot to make a draining well. I would eliminate this mistake the next spring by throwing its roof off, chiselling one more step out of the concrete base and pouring a concrete draining well with sandy bottom in front of the door.
There was also a weakness of the electrical system. Wiring was not symmetric, one of the lines sometimes overloaded. You had to learn how to use it without black-outs.
But my biggest concern has been the heating system. How to handle the boiler, the man taught me the day he built the additional wall in the house. Soon the ambient temperature made it necessary to kindle a fire. It was a Saturday. As I did it, my wife was washing. As she began to hang out sheets she said something like black snow was falling. As it came from the chimney I decided to take out soot, but could not find any hole at chimney base. Instead I found a small instrument, sophisticated, but obscure. Two wires twisted DNA-like, and a two-by-three-inch little shovel at the end, fixed perpendicularly to the stem. I guessed, he had used it to ladle out soot through the in-going smoke hole.
I went to a dealer of construction materials and bought a soot-hole cover. When I chiselled out the chimney base to build it in, two buckets of soot came out at once. Well, with soot we would not have problem any more.
Greatest faults in the heating have been an insufficient boiler and wrong radiator distribution. When I first went to our local fuel dealer to order heating oil, he said he had seen the former owners sit in the house in coats because of weak heating system. As the weather turned cooler and our makeshift boiler went out-of-order more than once, we decided with my wife to look for a plumber to put in a new boiler and an additional radiator in our room. Reconstruction has been done in the first cold days in December, but after that both our new boiler and our room became fine.
Some months have passed before I could find the proper kind of coal for our boiler, both economical and making continuous burn possible.
The arm of our son has healed and both nails have been taken out. He has retained them as a souvenir. We began to live a normal life after our first months of emergency.
For some years my capacity during leisure time has been well utilized. I had to make a good bench in the basement with a tool chest, to be able to do good work. The garden had to be put into order. At first, trees properly cut and sprayed by insecticides. Then digging it up and plant it with vegetables. To ensure access from gate to the shed, along the side of the property a concrete drive of two tracks had to be built. I did this work in the first summer after the basement correction and a new back fence.
That old back fence has been a shame. It was made of boards, but, as its poles had rotten long away, it has been an open surface for our soil to sip through to the neighbour’s, being two feet lower than our site. The new fence has a concrete base and steel pipe poles for wire-mesh. It will still be O.K. for a century.
The terrace has also been unfinished. Only holes for the railing has been left in its floor, I had to buy the steel profiles, cut them to size, drill, screw, assemble and put it up into the holes. At last I poured concrete to fix its legs in the holes.
All these works have been finished in two years.