My Own Ever After_A Memoir by Heather Huffman

Author:Heather Huffman [Huffman, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 40495697
Published: 2018-06-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

May 2013 through May 2014 was… well, I don’t really know how to describe it. An adventure? A blur? Absolute insanity?

As much as I adored my little gray house, it had its quirks. We’d leased it with the intention of buying it once we’d financially recovered from the accident, but enough had gone wrong during our first year to give us pause. And then, it happened. I don’t remember where the leak started, but there must have been water somewhere there shouldn’t have been because I called our landlord. He came out a couple of days later to try to help find the source of the leak. He, honest to goodness, tried to find it with a dowsing rod. When he couldn’t, he asked me to try because he said women were supposed to be better at that sort of thing. I remember feeling bad for him as I noticed his hands trembling. He suspected what I did, I’m sure—the problem was not a small one.

When our landlord finally admitted he couldn’t find the leak, he called in someone to do the work. Eventually, a trench was dug in the yard to get to the pipes. As it turned out, whomever built the house had put it on a concrete slab instead of a foundation, and the drought the year before had caused the slab to shift, knocking pipes loose. Getting to the pipes was a time consuming and costly endeavor. Our leak was eventually fixed, but I’d made my mind up that I would not be buying the little gray house when the time came.

Apparently, about the time I was realizing I did not want to inherit the costly repairs I knew the house would need, our landlord’s wife was deciding she wanted out from under the house that had just cost them a small fortune.

It was my neighbor who broke the news. She lived in a matching house across the field from ours, owned by the same person. She flagged me down one morning to ask if I’d heard the news that our landlords wanted to sell both properties. She was upset and already fretting over where they would go. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was reeling nonetheless. No, I didn’t want to buy the gray house, but I didn’t want to leave it, either. I loved the lay of the land, my pond, my flowers, and my creek. We’d worked like dogs to finish fencing it. I loved that stinking house.

After I excused myself, I remember walking down to my favorite field and just sobbing. I mean a heart-wrenching, belly-hurting, ugly cry. For the second time in a year, I was losing my home. Only now I had horses and goats and ducks and chickens in the mix. I’d told two separate friends I could take in their alpacas. (Before the accident, I’d been seriously alpaca shopping. When the accident happened, that dream died. Then the alpaca market crashed, and I inherited a few.)

I’d pulled myself together by the time the landlord’s wife called me to give me the news herself.

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