Buying My First Bra

         

 My grandma bought me my first bra.  Now if you ask my mother, she’ll shake her head and swear that she was the one who held my hand as she ushered me through this most sacred of entry doors to womanhood.  But she’d be wrong.  She brought me on my first bra shopping trip sure enough, but our hunt that day was unfruitful. And that’s when grandma came to visit.

            Looking back, I’m pretty sure Grandma’s impending visit was the reason Mom suddenly took an interest in my support wear- not that I had suddenly developed anything that necessitated underclothing - but because grandma was crazy. I know as you read this that many of you are smiling, nodding and recalling your own wacky relations.  (it bonds us; makes us similar and I appreciate that- it’s helpful when sharing embarrassing stories of puberty- but it also lessens the crazy that this woman wore like stolen boy scout pants*.)  

            “There’s a garage sale in your neighborhood.”  Grandma grinned at my sister and me as she poured the milk.

             We were both eager to go. We wolfed down our breakfasts and grabbed up our few dollars and shoved them into whatever purse was the latest one that grandma had given us. Both of these facts were important because Grandma hated greedy kids and she hated even more, ungrateful ones but she also seemed to feel a sense of loss if none were to be found and so she was quite skilled at making my sister and me fit the bill, and we in turn, wore lots of hair clips fashioned out of neon shoelaces.

          Garage saling with Grandma usually guaranteed a happy day. If we could pack in a few sales every day it an ensured an entire visit of relative peace. Here we were, only a few hours into the morning and already on our way to hunt bargains—it bode well for this visit and we could all sense it as we tromped out the front door with high spirits. I know my step faltered a bit, when we –my sister and I decked out in some god-awful Christmas sweaters that we’d just been gifted from the Ropa Usada-- realized that the sale we were heading for was not just ‘in the neighborhood’ but directly across the street. As in, we knew these people. I babysat for their kids, borrowed cups of sugar from them, just generally wanted to keep that certain respect that’s usually cultivated between neighbors that never trade nickels for worn-out socks. 

         My sister was younger and therefore had been embarrassed less by grandma’s voracious bargain hunting (like how the second deer brought down by a pack of wolves knew a tid bit less about being chewed on than the first) but even she hung back and together, the two of us dawdled our way across the street until we no longer could avoid being within the perimeters of the sale. We slouched near the “free” bin nearly in the road, not touching anything, definitely not looking at anything, in the vain attempt to make it appear that we’d just donned these sweaters and large old-lady satchels for a casual August morning walk and had only paused here because we were in the area.

                Mom and Grandma didn’t notice our reticence and set to work seeking treasures. In a matter of minutes, Katie and I were joined by quite a few other kids that we knew from school. Most of them were my age and looked just as horrified to be spotted as we were. Somehow, their misery made me feel loads better. I was, at least, used to this kind of Saturday. If the world suddenly ended and we few embarrassed teenagers at the curb were all that was left, then I would be likely be nominated as the leader for my knowledge and adeptness for the situation.

          I felt that we instantly became closer friends as we all kept our backs to the cardboard boxes of bargains and maniacally pretended that we weren’t standing at the base of a garage sale while our parents shopped. The cute boy that always sat in the back of the school bus and that I’d never had the guts to talk to even directed a chin lift greeting my way. And there, in the sunshiney day of summer and childhood and innocence I chose to ignore that it was probably my sweater that made him notice me. Today, we were all comrades ignoring our silly parents and nothing could find a chink in that armor.

           “Jennifer! Get in here,” Grandma called me up to where the Buick was parked and tables were piled with clothes. I could hear my peers snickering, grateful that the gods of the garage hadn’t chosen them as the next victim. That was fine. I’d been through my fair share of embarrassing moments and really what could a table of suburban housewife clothes have that was worse than what I was already wearing? I should have noticed when my mom wouldn’t make eye contact with me.        
             But Grandma sure did.
             For about 2 seconds before her focus dropped to my chest. 

             “Jennifer, they’ve got bras. Try this on.”
             “Grandma...” I looked to my mom to back me up here while I mentally scrambled, “we actually just had this discussion just yesterday- with real professionals, even- and I’m good.” 

            “If you’re not going to try it on, then I will.” Grandma growled.  (She wasn’t talking about putting it on her own body- she was meaning that if I wouldn’t do it willingly, then she would get it on me unwillingly.
          My panic latched onto something that might slow her. “A whole dollar a piece. That’s salty.” And I backed away. But I didn’t get far. 

             “If you’re gonna be a baby about it, then we’ll just try it on over top of the sweater.” Grandma had the neighbor lady’s ragged nursing bra up over my arms with a speed that would have stunned a seasoned cat bather. Then my mom got to work at my back girdling up all the extra wool that my ridiculous modesty had put between me and the perfect fit.

            The two of them mashed and tugged and worked in horrific harmony to take me through several bra fittings all under the stunned audience of neighborhood kids and passersby. We tried on a whole box of them suckers. I went home with quite a few and all it cost was a few dollars and a lot of dignity that I really didn’t need anyway.

---

*In truth, grandma never wore these pants that I mention- she gave them to me as a birthday present. They were huge and how she wrested them from the grip of the scout, I’ll never know, but when I wore them to school, oblivious in my brotherless life to all things scout, my friends were quick to inform me that somewhere in the world there was a naked boy scout holding up his three fingers and cursing my name.

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Don't Feed The Bums

This little story got an honorable mention in the 2013 Delizon Short story contest and will be published this Fall.
 

      The first real house that my husband and I bought was in Albany, New York. Deep in downtown, like I could see the capital from our window. City buses, taxis, singing whinos, cracked concrete sidewalks, graffiti, all of those things you associate with city living we had in spades. This story is about one of those middle things- the singing whinos.

       We’d moved to New York for my husband to start medical school. I’d landed a job at the Jewish Community Center and the pittance they’d be paying me would be what we’d live on for the next four years. But the stars of my poor pay and the depressed housing market of the area aligned and on our first day there, we opened the realtors'  Housing For Sale page to a ray of heavenly sun and a section entitled: “Under $5,000”.

     There were homes- entire homes with bathrooms, roofs, walls, stairways, and carpet complete with quaint cigarette burns- for less than the cost of a car.  (Not any car that we could afford at the time, but still, that’s the perspective we framed these treasures in.) That first night in town, before we’d even gone out with a realtor, Chuck and I sat up late picking out our favorites and giggling about how we could go totally Daddy Warbucks on this town and buy two.

            Then dawn came and with it, actual physical visits to meth houses and the reality of a realtor that wouldn’t even get out of his car in the neighborhoods we requested, asbestos waivers to sign and crime tape to duck under.  It was a fun-filled week but in the end, self preservation wrung a few more dimes out of our tightwad paws and we sprang for a $30,000 house in a neighborhood that the local cops gave a shoulder-shrug rating of what we interpreted to mean, “so-so.”

            It was a two story brick row house the color of burnt chocolate and I swear to you in a most ardent fashion, that it was love at first sight. There’s really no other way to explain why I would have fought to buy it. It had been abandoned for 30 years. No water, no electricity, a few radiators remained but all of them had long ago exploded leaving the walls pitted with shrapnel and sprayed with what I first assumed to be blood (again, I’d been on the home tour of Dante’s Inferno for a solid week and this wasn’t even remotely a deal breaker) but what I later learned was heating oil. We couldn’t even walk down the main hallway on our initial visit because the lead paint was peeling in such thick massive curls that it truly resembled a gauntlet. There was no kitchen and where the bathroom should have been there was just a massive sagging hole where the roof had leaked, the bathtub had overflowed (for decades!) and finally the floor had just given up and fallen through. I took my first peek into the abyss where the bath should have been and there, 14 feet down, was a Volkswagen Beetle crushed by a toilet. And my thought was not to run, but to rush and put in a bid on this house before the seller realized they’d forgotten their car.

    I should have just titled this thing, “Being greedy and my weighty lessons in Karma”. We bought the house and a month later, moved in. Maybe someday I'll write a book about all the adventures surrounding that address, but for now I’ll just share the story of my first day as mistress of 77 Spring Street.

      On our initial day of home ownership, Chuck had medical school orientation so I was to go and get our place move-in ready on my own. Our realtor gave me keys to our new home, but those slacker pieces of metal were about to get fired when I realized what a crap job they’d been doing for the past few decades. As I opened my door for the first time I was greeted by half a dozen bleary-eyed men who I’d evidently awoken.  (The sleeping bags and their yelling is what tipped me off.) I think I went out and cried for a bit and then, realizing I didn’t have a whole lot of options, re-entered my home and tried again. This second time they were actually very nice and after the initial awkwardness of kicking them out, they seemed to understand that I had just bought the house and would not want them creeping in through the broken windows anymore.

            While I moved in my broom and box of black trash bags, the bums gathered their meager supplies, waved good-bye, and each seemed to take a different exit from the house-- kitchen window, rear window, porch fire escape, through useless back door and the last one, by shoving out the doorknob (and then kindly replacing it) of the door I was holding the keys for. It was like watching one of those night vision videos an exterminator would make to show you all the ways the mice are breaching your home. Well, my fortress was definitely not a secure one, but as the last bum wished me well, I was now mistress of my first home.

            The broom and trash bags- I mention them because they illustrate that even as I took up residence in this house-- even after I’d signed on the dotted line and mentally committed to potentially raise children in this husk of a home-- that I didn’t comprehend what I’d gotten into. I’d just evicted vagrants that spoke as if they’d been there for generations. I will tell you right now, that structure didn’t reach a broom and trash bag level of cleanliness until months later. On that first morning, I made a circuit of my new hellhole while dragging those naïve supplies. I don’t think I’d even made it to the sans kitchen before I pitched those futile tools into a corner, bought myself a snow shovel and work gloves and hired a dumpster to be delivered every week.

            Needless to say, that first day was a doozy. Luckily, Chuck and I hadn’t been sure that we’d be able to get a key to get into the place on the first day (yeah, I find it funny to realize that any sketchy guy on the street probably could have shown me how to get into the house), so we'd gotten a hotel room for the night. We met up that evening- me filthy and rushing to the first running water I’d seen all day, and him, shell shocked as a flag boy after hearing how med school intended to crush his soul- and we planned our attack on the next day.  The hole in the bathroom floor was bigger--well, it was the whole bathroom floor and fixing that would be first on the agenda.

            The next morning when we pulled up to our house, my bums were sitting on the front stoop. I think they assumed that I wouldn’t come back. If I had to guess/translate their silent gawks, my money would be on: “What she doing back? Who’d choose to live here? Slappy didn’t even stay a night before he went back to sleeping under the bridge. I mean, man, I claim no address before I’d admit to this place.” They shuffled off but not before I tried to introduce myself. In a way, they were my first neighbors and I was sort of new at all this, but I was eager for some friends.

            Those thoughts stuck with me for the rest of the beastly, heinous workday. Have you ever pulled a rotting toilet off of a rotting Volkswagen? Have you ever been near ceramic so fouled that it actually rotted? I blame my wandering mind on those surroundings. I got to thinking that the homeless men weren’t just sort of like my neighbors; they were actually my neighbors. The one who seemed the most sober had mentioned that they’d see me again tomorrow. One of the least sober ones had explained that our address is where they met every morning. I got a little thrill at hearing my house being described in the framework of being a community hub of sorts. A gathering place.

            I pictured me being one with the people of Albany; fist bumps and jokes and them helping me carry in my groceries and me getting them to give up drinking as we had evening talks on lawn chairs near the cobblestone street. I decided that I better get all these future relationships started on the right foot. The third morning, though we had ZERO money and I’d eaten nothing but potatoes for weeks, I blew a portion of our renovation budget on McDonald’s breakfasts for the seven neighbors that I expected on my front stoop.

            Morning came and so did seven of my friends. They gratefully took the breakfasts and more grunted than chatted with me as they wolfed down the egg McMuffins. I didn’t want to push the relationship too fast, so I excused myself to work on boarding up one of the upper windows. It didn’t take me long—a mere 48 hours in that house had trained me to be pretty good at boarding up openings-- so I was gone maybe 10 minutes before I returned to check on my guests.

            When I walked out onto my front steps, I was greeted with more vomit than I’ve ever seen in my life. You could work at a vomit store and never witness the volume that I saw. The bums were long gone, but they had left enough puke enough that it literally rolled down the sidewalk. 

      This was the moment I became a city girl.

      The crime scene tape, the pitbulls, the broken car glass on the sidewalks, the hair weaves sold at the grocery store, none of it made me cynical because I truly believed that I could find a silver lining in all of it. But in that moment of putrid reality, of realizing that I owned no garden hose and even if I did, that had no water to turn on anyway and that I had zero ways to spray that filth off my doorstep --in that moment, I would have used my worthless house keys to stab the next drunken bum that tried to “attend their daily meeting”.

     That morning I became a student at the school of cold hard facts:

       You feed a drunk homeless man a greasy breakfast and they’re going to puke it up all over your front steps. And there ain’t no silver lining to that.

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Rudy the Cat

My sister begged for a cat for years—and let me tell all the kids out there within view of my font- it is an effective method for getting what you want. When she was nine years old, our parents took us to the cat store. (You’ll recognize the exact same one playing “The Pound” in those Sarah Mclachlan commercials). Katie climbed into the kitten pen and picked out her dream kitty, a smoke colored little cuddler that she named Rudolph Valentino for his affectionate nature. She adored that kitten. And if it’s true what they say about babies growing from love, then this would have become one enormous cat. I can tell you definitively that this wisdom does not apply to felines.  This cat was loved to max capacity and at that point a switch was flipped, it was like his reservoir for affection tipped out all over the floor till he was bone dry. He became that member of the family that you were glad couldn’t reach the knife drawer and that you didn’t mention to your friends, but was also scary enough to grab that he wasn’t easy to keep hidden and they had to be pretty good friends for you to risk your own hide for their comfort and if they were that good of friends, shouldn’t they accept you for your man-eating cat?

            As frequently as Rudy bit us, I’d be prouder to say that it only took me a few weeks before I learned to give him a wide berth. But nope. It was a rare blood-letting that I would have the thought of, “Duh, should have seen that one coming.” I always remember being taken by total surprise that this creature the color of a dust bunny could be so full of teeth. By the time Rudy was full-grown, and knew our routines, he’d become the feline version of the cranky old lady at the end of the street. The one you knew was a witch that lived on human suffering. Just imagine that lady with pinty teeth, and she lurked in the shadows beneath your couch, enjoyed the flavor of kid flesh and the law couldn’t touch her.

            Rudy was actually my cure for fearing any kind of monster under the bed. As tough as I must appear to you nowadays, that was actually my “thing”.  I couldn’t watch Jaws without leaping the entire carpeted expanse of my bedroom because of the absolute surety that I was in some shark’s crosshairs. Once we adopted Rudy, I didn’t have to wonder what kind of monster was going to chew on me, it was only a question of when. Putting a face to the beast, parents, works better than any hug.  This motherly wisdom came later, though. As a ten year old, I trusted in evolution. Monsters had avoided detection for years because they were efficient and logical creatures (who hadn’t been tragically over-loved past the tipping point to evil like my cat). These noble beasts wouldn’t waste energy losing a turf war to my kitty amid the lost socks and board game pieces of my under-bed when there were way easier pickings at any other house.

            Do you know those nature shows where the lions lurk in the grass near the watering hole because they know the antelope will come? The family room sofa divided the kitchen from the TV room and you had to pass it to get to the front door. It was smack dab in the trifecta of places that kids needed to get. So that’s where Rudy would wait.

 

            Rudy had a few different methods for being a bad pet. Number 1: He would bite us. Number 2: He would chase us down the hall and spring onto the back of our legs, wrapping his sinewy kitty arms around a calf like he was climbing a palm tree, ten nasty claws would secure his hold and then he would kick with his back legs in a furious race against time and epidermis. You know how for some people, the smell of freshly cut grass or barbecue brings them back to their childhood? Blood-curdling screams of surprise do it for me. Number 3: He would lure us in and then do both. Now you can dismiss the next lines of my story as the confused ramblings of an old man, because if I hadn’t seen it myself, I wouldn’t believe a kitty could be so conniving. Now, cats are fast, much faster than pudgy little girls, so he could have chased me down and chewed on me anytime he wished, but when Rudy was feeling especially cruel he would purr and be cute. He’d trick us into coming to him. Lucky for us, Rudy was a poor actor. When he was faking, his purr was too high-pitched and his nostrils would flare and his eyes turned blacker.

As rotten as he was, he was also endlessly entertaining. Katie and I would dare each other to dash past him. We’d risk his lashings and dress him up in cabbage patch clothes and we had an entire ranking system for his attacks like, from under the couch hurt less than from the back of it and--especially on days when your hemoglobin was low—being bit was better than being clawed.

One day, my mom had decided it was high time that we got family portraits taken. She dressed up my sister and I to look alike and then set to work making our hair look absolutely like it never looked in real life. When she finished her work on us, she started in on herself and Katie and I were commanded to, “Sit still! Don’t get wrinkled! And don’t even think of touching that perm that I just molded into the perfect triangle!”

            Katie and I plunked down on the sofa to wait. Rudy was there and he began to purr.  One glance told me it was no good. But Katie was distracted, maybe telling me about her day or something, and sort of nonchalantly like she petted cats everyday (which she didn’t! because I’d have noticed the bloody stumps that suddenly replaced her hands).  Maybe she saw my face, or the way I instinctively tensed up when she began stroking him, or maybe she too heard that moment that Rudy stopped purring and that cat version of a villain’s hehehe began.

            Katie let out this little, “Oh…” and pulled back her arm slowly, like maybe he wouldn’t notice.

There was a split second of eerie stillness where Rudy’s eyes, black and shiny like a doll’s eyes, rolled white and in that next moment, he went Old-Yeller-in-the-corn-crib crazy. He rose up on his hind legs like a bear, sort of slow like and launched himself at her head –sprang onto her hair and clung like some sort of hideous cat-hide hat. She screamed and Rudy yowled. Katie started running—for  what, I’ll never know—but she ran like her head was on fire, and that cat, with his hackles up and tail exploded and gripping her scalp like he was taking down a grizzly bear—well, he looked like a grey flame.

She disengaged him from her hair, but he wasn’t ready to give up and slid his way, spitting and clawing all the way down her back. Their gruesome dance ended when Katie finally managed to pry him off the rear of her skirt.

Katie straightened up, breathing like a runner after a hill and her hands went to her mangled hair. Lots of it came out in her fingers and she sort of just patted it back into place. She looked like she’d just crawled through the paper shredder. Her little hands, crisscrossed in angry pink welts went to the tattered remains of her dress. She let out the kid version of a string of blue curse words where the swearing is done all with the eyes and in the tone: “Oh, no. Do you think Mom’ll be mad?”

           

To my mother’s credit, she wasn’t mad. She dabbed up the blood, fixed up Katie to look fine from the front and we went and took those pictures. To this day they’re some of my favorites because I know why my sister’s hair looks lopsided and I know why she’s sitting in every photo.

More house stories coming soon.  I just entered a few essay contests and some of them won't let me post my entries, so cross your fingers for me!  Or, if you're feeling selfish, don't cross your fingers and then I won't win and then I'll be able to put every story up here all the sooner.

God's squirt gun, the proper recipe for toad slime and other kid secrets

Since I choose to do my computer work next to an open window, I usually spend more time watching and listening to the kids. Between you and me, productivity is not why I sit there.

For most of the morning a toad hunt has been underway, but the day was getting hot and a cluster of neighborhood kids were now gathered in the shade of a tree near our house.

"Guess how big God's squirt gun would be?" a blond neighbor boy asks. There's a pause as all the kids look around furtively like they sense that the conversation had just veered toward the deep secrets of the universe, and more importantly, that they are bound to get into trouble for it. It always gets me, where kids expect discipline to could come from and then the frog-in-the-fridge-because-he-was-hot times when they couldn't be more surprised.

My daughter, who's the oldest in the group and therefore considered the sagest, pipes up, "Well I don't know, but it has to be the opposite of Tinkerbell's." A nodding of all the heads in the group. Little frowns, little furrowed brows, it looks like Congress.

"Can I add the flowers now?" Rosalie asks.  I hadn't noticed before, but she's got a pot of what looks like mud and a stick to stir it with. The other thing I newly notice is that it isn't a pot, but one of my best tupperwares. The big one, that I always stuff leftovers into and they magically always seem to just fit.

"Sure, but slowly, so you can stop if the potion gets chunky."

"I've mashed the berries and he's gonna love this," the neighbor boy with the deep questions adds.  There's 6 of them all huddled over the bucket of swirling brown alternately stirring and adding precise extractions from their pockets. I make out that this potion is for the leprechaun who lives in the base of a nearby tree.

 As it turns out, he is the reason there are no toads to be caught this morning.

"He wrangles them," explains my 7 yr old son who recently saw part of Shane. In one of those rarely witnessed moments, he has his arm around S and is filling in his little sister and with the seriousness that kids can only muster when they're trying to catch something; he's teaching her the finer points of leprechaun culture. They don't have cars. Of course they don't, they're too short to reach the pedals. Leprechauns travel by toadback through underground passageways that connect their trees to the trees of other good little children. He grins at her, and I can tell that he's added this last part for the exact same reason that I say things like, "Santa always knows who's good and who's bad."

As I watch, the kids add pine cones and bits of string, spit from each of them and even some mashed up worms.  From the groans and giggles I can tell that it has to be truly rank smelling. The theory behind the potion seems to be that if a good child sprinkles some around a leprechaun's door at night, then that leprechaun will come to investigate and when he opens the door all the toads will get out. I picture an old woman in her bathrobe and curlers peering out after being ding-dong-ditched and the dag-nabbed cat slipping out.

Charlie speeds into the house and past me to retrieve a carton of rotten cottage cheese from our trashcan and into the potion it goes. As usually happens with adult life, I get distracted with work and lose track of the kids for awhile until I hear a gut-wrenching wail coming from outside.  It's K, my oldest, I know immediately by the voice and I also know, like a knife to my core, that she's hurt and hurt badly. I fly outside, preparing for a broken leg, a skinless arm, 9 fingers-- something serious-- but when I get to her I see it's nothing like that.

And I run to go get my camera.

Charlie fills me in on the details, though, by the smell and the sight of my now empty tupperware, I can guess the gist. K decided since they had to wait until nightfall to put out the potion that it would be safest waiting up in a tree.  She spied a branch, hoisted the slop-filled bucket up and then... it toppled onto her own head.

Maybe the leprechaun had a few tricks up his sleeve for protecting his wrangled toads.

Or maybe, just maybe, the Great Smiter really doesn't appreciate discussions about his summer toy collection.

Dogsitting

We had dogsitting duty this past week.

Ugh, no pretty pictures about that.  I am just sitting down from my attempt to detox the house, sanitize the floors and carpets and couches and curtains and kids clothing and trying to rid our home of eau de kennel.

Here, pictured above, is one of the Hades beasts we were charged with.  Now multiply that mug by three. THREE OF THEM. Three, all equally demonic in their ability to run away, poo upon anything cotton-based and pee upon just plain anything. Three extra dogs. Add in the blind pug we already fight to keep alive it makes FOUR little DOGS in one house.
   As Charlie observed, "there was more poop than a poop store." (Oh, you've never been to one of those fine shops?  Well let me tell you, they're not for the faint of heart.)

    In preparation for the three-dog nightmare I removed all the rugs from the main floor of the house and blocked off any carpeted rooms. Or I thought I had. There'd be a bath mat here, a rag rug there, or a baby blanket that resembled a rug and those four-legged evil masterminds would soil it in really record time. By the second day I had everything fabric-ish off the floor. This kinked the dogs sensibilities. "What are we to pee upon?" they seemed to ask themselves and for a brief hour, they all succumbed to using the grass.
     But then the kids returned from school and in proper kid fashion flung backpacks and coats and drawings of Br-unnies (that's a bunny mixed with a bird and very fashionable with the 3rd grade sect) upon the floor.  The dogs smiled and got to work.

   By day three I'd resorted to throwing down extra sheets and drop cloths over almost every surface. I, a college-educated adult, could outsmart these urine-dribbling monsters. I would direct their pottying onto cottons which I could wash.

Or throw away.  That's really what ended up happening. And I think the dogs know that they can chalk up a win for that. When I was in the heat of the battle, desperate to keep my toddler from waddling throw dog filth, I thought I was winning as I whisked away sheet after sheet and for a brief moment had a clean haven. But when my dogsitting duties were done and I looked at the pile of soiled sheets on the deck...
      What was the next step?  I could shake out the little dried turdlettes and then throw the sheets into the washing machine...? Then in the very next load do the kids shirts?  I couldn't do it. I briefly considerd going to a laundromat. Whomever used the machine after me would never even know the foulness that went on before them.  When I was newly married and dirt-poor living in New York I had to use a laundromat. We were doing really hard, filthy manual labor repairing a decrepit rowhouse out there and I swear to you that my sooty-grey work clothes came out of those laundromat machines dirtier than when they went in. 

Now I know that I must have always gotten the machine previously used by some poor soul on dogsitting duty.
~
 But now the week is done and the extra dogs are gone. It cost me many loads of laundry, all my drop cloths, quite a few rugs and a costco-sized box of paper towels, but only one Saturday was ruined as the whole neighborhood worked to track down that one lucky dog-catcher who, in his own words, "had never caught one this small and my dispatcher was really hoping she could keep it."
   Ahh, I am free.
 And ahh, I am now breathing deeply of air that is not canine-tainted.  My home smells like oranges and vanilla right now.  And I guess that's the happy end to this tale. You must endure stench to be able to enjoy pleasant. That's in the Bible somewhere, isn't it?

Okay, love didn't exactly steam its way out of my pot, but after the week of stink, the heavenly aroma of oranges and vanilla ranked right up there with adoration.