The Homeowner, Part 2

Houses are money pits. It’s not their fault; it’s their nature. I suppose I still would have bought my house had I known how expensive it would be. It’s equity, after all. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not stupid; I knew it would be expensive. I knew we had to put a sizable down on it, to reduce the years we would need to pay for it (interest rates were about six percent back then, far better than the sixteen when I graduated, but six percent still made for fairly big payments); and I knew we had a lot of furniture to buy, considering neither Bev nor I had much of anything. What I didn’t realize was all the other stuff we had to buy too.

We were lucky in that we were able to buy much of our first furniture from the prior owners. That saved us a lot of money. And we were able to buy some discontinued floor models from the furniture stores, saving us a bundle more.

We were very lucky in that my parents bought us a used snow blower as our house-warming gift. It was also my birthday gift and my Christmas gift that year.

We were not so lucky in much else. There was a lawnmower to buy, rakes and shovels and deck furniture. And a barbeque. And utensils for the barbeque. There were can openers, there were pots and pans and utensils and cutlery. Spices! There were sheets, and pillows and headboards and skirts. And there were phones and cable and utilities to connect. I really don’t think either of us realized just how much there was to do when setting up your first house.

There were the big expenses, to: there were taxes, there was insurance.

That left little for food. I jest, but that’s what it felt like. Jeff was rightly amused one day by the thinness of fast-fry steaks I’d bought to barbeque, but when one is on a budget, one must scrimp where one must save. But food was a must.

That left even less for vacations. Maybe we ought to have skipped one that year, but we didn't. We did go to Manitoulin that year in September. It didn’t cost much, just the gas and the groceries, and we’d have bought those, either way.

Summer became autumn, the leaves paled, green to yellow and then spotted brown, falling, becoming brittle and crunching underfoot. Winds shifted from West to North. The first snows lit upon the blanket of leaves I’d ceased racking after the October rains became November flurries.

There were Christmas trees to buy, Christmas lights, Christmas gifts.

Then the snow came.

It was a big year for snow. It snowed every day. It snowed every day! There were flurries, there were centimeters of accumulation. There were three to five, there were ten to fifteen. If it did not snow, it blew.

The wind picked it up and swirled it around and I discovered that my house was built in such a way as to invite an eddy at my door. I also discovered that a double wide drive is not a boon. A double wide drive holds a lot of snow, far more than a single. The banks are higher, the crests reaching a meter in height in no time, making it a chore to throw the snow over it, snowblower or no snowblower. My snowblower was old, the chute lower than later models. I had to pull the banks down when they rose too high.

I cleaned out the driveway everyday one week, only to watch as the wind carried another meter back into it. I cleaned it before going off to nightshift, only to discover that an equal amount had filled it while I was gone, and had to clear it again so that Bev could get to work, a task that took about an hour.
Then the melted windblown snow stalled the machine. I had to finish by hand. I cleared what I could and collapsed into bed, only to rise to a blinding blanket of sunlit snow having swept back across the width of the drive, once again.

I woke too early, having slept for no more than five hours. Seeing that much snow again crushed me. “Will this never end?” I thought. I staggered out to clear it again before Bev got home. The blower would not start. I’d always had trouble with the electric start. If the machine didn’t start on the first pull, it flooded, and it flooded just then. I called my father, asking him to come over to help me. When he arrived, he noted that the shaft was slightly bent on the electric starter, causing the teeth to wear down. “That might be the problem,” he said. He removed it to have it repaired, while I started back in on scooping up the snow and wrestling it up hill, up a track I’d built on either side of the driveway. My father tried starting the machine again, saying that it had probably sat long enough. It started on the first pull, manually. I never used the electric start again, and never really had trouble with it ever again, either, not until it had grown old, the belts and springs and bushings likely worn out like the teeth on the starter. The only real trouble I ever had with it was when the auger belt went, years later. None fit it. The manufacturer had stopped making that exact diameter of sheave wheel. Any replacement belt I tried was either they were too loose or too tight. I finally found one that almost fit. The blades never stopped rotating after that.

The next day, my neighbour left a note under my windshield wiper: “Please don’t put any snow in my yard.”

I noticed that he had no issue putting about three quarters of his own snow in his neighbour’s.

I ignored his note. What’s good for the goose, and all that….