A Year With Jill

This is about a grand adventure I took with my daughters from the West Coast to a very rural New England town.

The goal was to stay with a friend of some thirty some odd years and the plan took some turns. We left Hawaii and trained from Oregon to New England.

I thought it would be a fun and life changing experience to take an Amtrack across the entire U.S. This was our beginning, the first thrill of heading East begun. In reality, the train experience , even with it’s being stuck for hours in the Dakatokas, was a grand adventure. I could write a blog on this alone, it was a great time..

But this story is about what happens when we get to New England. I am leaving out the name of this town for obvious reasons. The train arrives , Jill greets us with a cold smile , “not so unlike her” I tell myself. We are exhausted from the five day journey and really looking forward to showers and a meal without motion. It is lovely to see the landscape I knew so well from my youth. It’s a raw and old feel, a place that holds some of my own ghosts.

I’ve stayed in touch with Jill over the years. Kept her up to date and she did the same as well. We exchanged photos as my family grew and we shared our woes over broken relationships, divorce and times of loss. I felt we had had a bond with roots that entwined so deep, nothing could hurt us. I learned that these feelings were just an illusion. This person had some serious issues with secrets, moods, addictions and anger. A person who managed to create such a perfect little World of her own. To the outside World she was a “Church goer” a “Do Gooder” a “straight and narrow worker and a white collar place” and an advocate of animals, backing it with her vegetarian diet and life choices for clothing and certain things that may apply to using anything animal. Never mind her severe neglect towards her own.These qualities were now the qualities that attracted me to her when we were so very young. These are images that she has created for others to see. The purpose? You tell me. I am clueless but maybe a shrink would have a field day with this? I am not here to analyze or even judge. I just want to share and not miss a morsel because I have experienced this and it’s real truth is more than enough to chew.

I don’t know if I made this clear but I choose to handle things dished out to me in life, with humor. It is the only way I have been able to get through this life I have. I have had a great life in many ways, don’t get me wrong. I do however have huge moments, pages, even chapters in my life that are painful. I don’t think many of us are exempt from this, not even Jill. But again, I have to share this experience.

I am going to cover this story in categories. This way I won’t leave anything out, hopefully. The first category is:

Decorating:

So  now that I have created the image of her “outside” personality correctly, I will share even more. Her home is an older home bought with her second Husband about twenty years ago. He fled as soon as possible, leaving the house to her and the little barn on eight acres. In all honesty, I couldn’t stand this guy . He was a fake himself and unable to keep up the act. Long story short, it backfired. This old house has qualities that one would find in an abandoned home or one just visited sparingly in warmer seasons perhaps. Wallpaper stripped leaving shreds of the older paper with lots of yellow wall left. Huge water stains all over the ceilings and walls are quite visable and cobwebs make it Halloween anytime of the year. The house is full of broken clocks, broken furniture, broken appliances, lots of broken knick knacks and cards that she dates and then leaves around. This is a woman who fills her rooms with decorating books . Books of blue and whites because she only decorates in blue and white. It also can only be in a certain style according to her. So I look around and see, actually see one thing and hear from her another. This is when a big bell went off in my head and my inner instinct said “look out”! In her mind she believes and has stated often, that she is a decorator. Not just that but she continues to go on about how I would not understand and that her style and taste is this and that. I say nothing,  Throughout the months I heard on numerous accounts just what a wonderful decorator she is via her. She does not allow anyone in her house although she is not a recluse. She just doesn’t want people seeing the inside of her house. I am guessing it might be because she hasn’t thoroughly convinced herself she is a great decorator. She even goes to the extent of exchanging books with “other” decorators. She was very proud to show me something she had always wanted. It was something she dreamt of getting since she could remember, a Grandfather clock. It stood at the very tip top of her stairway in the hall of her upstairs. Sitting cockeyed on a slab of something I couldn’t make out. It was shorter than most I’ve seen and was made of processed wood. Also it was covered in an inch of dust, or more. I didn’t see any hands moving. I asked the inevitable, “does it work”. No, she said with a stern voice, that doesn’t matter. Never mind the fact that it wasn’t even a real clock. I just smile and say something like “darling”.

Not one clock works correctly or at all in her house. She has three broken VCR machines on the top of her very dusty, broken entertainment center. A half broken TV with a gaping hole where the VCR used to be but her DVD player does work. The back of the TV clicker is open and the batteries constantly fall out. We finally taped the back and I don’t think she noticed. She has a throne to all of her dead animals with their remains in containers on a wiggly table displaying pictures of her with them or them alone. The animals are another category and well worth waiting for.

She decorates with dishes, broken dishes. Dishes with chips and chunks missiing. Potpourri in old chipped glass or ceramic bowls . Look inside of these bowls and you will find oodles of cat hair, dust balls and cobwebs. Her appliances all have rules. Her fridge is on the brink of dying . The sounds it makes makes me feel like it knows how desperate I am and wants to stay alive just for our sake. It’s filled with eggs she has kept for over twenty years. Yes, these are hard boiled eggs and painted and dated, of course. Even with all of the winter storm outages and blackouts, those eggs remain. The exterior of the fridge is rust, rust and more rust. She covers this (not really) with magnets and notes and many many pictures of herself. Also many quotes and Bible phrases that I wish she applied to her life. We were directed to not turn on the oven because it will “catch the house on fire”. ” What makes you think this”, I say. Well, she backed it up with a tale of one night smelling heat and no smoke really , just heat. I am a baker, so this is terrible news for me. One day, I try it out and guess what? The oven works just fine. Oh while we are on this subject, I cannot forget the lightbulbs. Yes, she is afraid lightbulbs will burst in her hands or anyones and will only have an electrician change them. She never ever would pay an electrician so she has terrible lighting. Upstairs in the girls room, she gave orders to not turn on the overhead light. I asked again why and it sounded so much like the other story, I had to try. It only needed a lightbulb, so I changed it. But the light she brought in to replace it was in the corner and here and there were more. My oldest daughters bed was a blowup matress on a metal frame with wood down holding it on. It was a clever design at the most and she really didn’t mind. When Jill had left for two weeks to visit family, I painted. I painted her front room, entrance and half of the TV room. Why half? because I could “only” use her paint and she bought only a gallon. It was nice to see some light in that place. When she returned, she looked happily mortified but did manage a teeny tiny “thanks”. Her curtains also got washed and that was the first time in over twenty years, a big occasion. They didn’t fall apart, I am not sure if that was a good thing. 

Her toilet has a lovely sea green hue to it’s insides. It also doesn’t flush correctly and every time we would go to the bathroom, she would run upstairs to make sure her pump wasn’t running too much and that the bowl was filling. It took awhile but I realized, she is a control freak! Rules are another category. Her clothes seem to be another decorating tool. She would wash with very little to no soap and hang her very wet clothes in the house. The house got little light and the clothes claimed a dew smell , one of urine almost. This was a nice smell for us to have while trying to eat dinner. Her underwear and socks hung with kitchen towels. And yes I found pubic hair in the kitchen towels. So I had to wait and sectretly wash those towels with some real soap and put them in the dryer then re-hang next to her clothes. She never figured it out. Her kitchen sinks had rules also, what else. The left sink was smaller and that was the rinsing sink. Her right sink , the deeper one, had a blue rubber tub in it. This rubber tub was stained and broken. I was given direct orders to not drain the water from that bowl into the big sink because the drain underneath had a leak. I fixed the leak and never mentioned it. Her front banister coming into the house was wobbly and unsafe. It was a balance act sometimes because those balls would fly right off.That would leave us struggling for balance.

She asked if I could paint her stairs and porch and gladly, very gladly, I did. I also painted the back stairs which lead to the kitchen and has a giant gaping hole from the top step to the step into the kitchen. Her barn door broke off completetly and I gladly paid for that to be repaired. She called an older man from her Church to come and fix it. He is a handyman of sorts, a whistler too. At one point he asked for a step ladder, she held her breath. I ran into the house to get one. Apparently I broke a rule.

She purchased a car with her fathers money , I call it the money pit. She has a system for everything and i mean everything. Her system for purchasing this car and juggling everyone and all her resources, backfired. This is when good old fashioned intuition and common sense come into play. But what do I know? In the first eight months of us being with her, she put in over four thousand dollars into her new/.used car. Leaving us all abandoned more than once. She uses this car as a channel for her decorating skills also apparently. Hanging from her dashboard mirror are rosary beads, a cross, an angel and a very bright pink tacky flamingo. They sway left to right while driving around in it. If you have vertigo like I do, it isn’t a pleasant experience. I think I will also leave her dressing and personal hygeine seperate. Those are lengthy categories.