Ironwood

 

I moved into an efficiency apartment at Ironwood Apartments without much fanfare at all. It was a simple move because I disposed of anything I didn't think I'd need there. I hadn't painted with my oil paints in a long time, so I got rid of them along with my microwave that had the spider living between the two panels of the glass door (some people felt this was a boon, because as long as he lived I knew the microwave wasn't leaking,) and I left my old vacuum sweeper and mops, as well as my clothes basket for future renters that I assumed would be students. My old landlord was pleased and he should have been. I left that place much better than it was when I moved in.

This new apartment was one long room with a very nice kitchen on the end where the front door was. I had a dishwasher, microwave, stove and kitchen peninsula. There was a closet with a stacked washer and dryer right next to a large bathroom with room to spare. The rest of the apartment was where I could put my queen size bed and desk along with any chairs or other small tables. There was a good sized closet with mirrored doors that made the room feel even bigger than it was and a door to the balcony out back. There was only one large window facing the balcony, but I got plenty of light in spite of the fact that I was facing north. I discovered facing north had a lot of advantages because I got light without direct sun in the summer months. My balcony faced the backyard of the neighboring Casey's so all I saw were bushes, grass and one beautiful tulip tree. I hung three baskets of big ferns across the top of the balcony and put some patio furniture out there. It was perfect. Over the four years I lived here I watched thunder storms, snow drifts and ducks who sometimes built their nests nearby. One year a pair of ducks built their nest on my balcony! I also had a bird  feeder here and it was as much fun to watch the squirrels figure out how to access it as the birds who came to eat.

I was still helping Andy work on his Agee book. We took a trip to Knoxville so we could do research work in the University archives and while we were there my son, Bobby, and his son, Lennon, came to visit us. It was the first time they and Andy met each other and it was a fit! We went swimming and bowling and out to eat and in between Bobby and I visited while Lennon and Andy played! That night Lennon's godfather joined us for dinner.

At home I was now using two computers, my laptop and my desk top to work on transcribing the Agee work. Later I transcribed an interview Andy did with Randall Keenan and helped edit that book. It was such an honor to listen to them talk! I made several trips to Louisiana to visit him and it was always as much fun as work. We played tennis and walked Maddie, his dog, and I visited his classroom. Sometimes we went to Chucky Cheese or simply put Legos together. Then he began looking for a job in another university and I got to help do some research on that. We became best friends, always there for one another no matter what. When he got the job at the University of Alabama, I visited first in his apartment and later at his house. One day when I was there it snowed and got icy. People weren't used to ice on the roads and they were sliding everywhere. The roads turned into giant parking lots and everything closed down. We were lucky. We could bundle up and walk to the grocery store so for us it was just more time to play and have fun. When Andy and Jeff got married my daughter, Becky, and I drove down for the wedding. It was one of the first gay marriages in that area and took place in the former governor's mansion, but the night before Becky and I joined his family for a buffet at the park near his and Jeff's home.

One time we went to Austin to do research at the Ransom Center. I had to qualify as a researcher and it made me feel so important! I used gloves and book holders to turn pages and take photos of the material we needed. While there we stayed in a two story house in a private community with a pool nearby and bicycles we could ride in the garage and an awesome children's museum nearby. Austin's food trucks amazed me. I had an amazing donut with maple icing and bacon on it and a taco made with runny fried eggs. I tried my first frozen banana and went to a place that sold icies that tasted like pumpkin pie! We bought gorgeous cupcakes with names like the Marilyn Monroe or wedding cake and split them between us. One of my favorite places to eat was the Salty Sow where we ordered a whole bunch of appetizers. Another restaurant that was more Italian had an upstairs balcony where we ate under a huge tree. There wasn't anything I didn't love about Austin. While we were there we visited a small town nearby where Andy and Jeff had lived one summer. It had a big old country barbecue place with wooden floors, ceiling fans and a very back country cowboy feel. We also went to an ice cream store where they made the ice cream on site. And another day we went to a place that had giant donuts. To say I ate a lot there would be an understatement.

Andy's grandmother died shortly before his wedding and I had sent the family a big hydrangea plant. They set that out in the foyer of the governor's mansion during the wedding and his mother gave me one of the dolls his grandmother had made herself. I named her Pearl after Pearline. Becky and I sat at the table with his mentor for the brunch and I enjoyed meeting this woman who had had such an influence on Andy's life. Later his dad bought us champagne and we had our choice of a grooms cake, wedding cake and beautiful cupcakes that looked like blooming flowers. They gave everyone little tins with blue and white m&ms in them and the date of the wedding. Later on we ended up driving all the way home, I ate all the m&ms but we had a wonderful time.

During this time I stopped volunteering at the Aviation museum, but kept up my work at Cedar Ridge Elementary school. I also stopped riding my bike because if I didn't want to park it in my condo, I had to park it outside and it was going to get rusty. I gave it to my granddaughter to use in Milwaukee. I did a lot of walking here, though. The Constitution Trail was not far off and I could walk into town or out into the country depending on my mood. I could also walk around the Ironwood complex, or through the neighboring park and community gardens.

I used to hit tennis balls against the back board at Miller Park and I tried it at Ironwood park, but it wasn't as satisfying. Their tennis courts were set up more for pickleball.

We had a swimming pool and a large pond surrounded by lots of trees and geese at Ironwood. The geese scared some people, but I discovered if I pretended to be a bigger goose, stuck my neck out and flapped my arms, they left me alone. Other people reported goose attacks where they got nipped. I never experienced that.

It was during one of these walks that I met Cheri, a large blonde woman who often wore a long brightly colored mu mu. She liked to walk her dog, Lucy and stopped me one day to introduce herself. Later she introduced me to Mary who also had a little dog. Mary's daughter owned an island and in the winter she and her dog would fly out there and stay until spring. Cheri knew lots of people. Some were people she went to school with back in Streator, Illinois, but all of them loved to lunch! We called ourselves the Ironwood Ladies and spent many lovely afternoons and evenings at tea houses, cafes, and restaurants.

I met many people while living here. One who whose son had been senselessly and brutally murdered by a gang! She was trying to start her life over without him by starting her own coffee shop in Morton, but she also walked dogs for the Humane Society eventually adopting one. When she was out of town for extended periods I took care of her plants for her. I just placed them in among my plants and they did very well. 

I often ran into another woman while walking. She was from South Africa and loved to try speaking French with me. I was not very good at all, but we had fun laughing about it.

And because I had a shirt that said Michigan English that Andy bought me on a trip to the university there, people were always yelling, "Go Michigan!" The first couple of times I didn't understand why, but I figured it out. Duh!

Another time I heard a woman yelling in the apartment across the hall, then she began beating on my door asking for help! I opened the door and she rushed in followed by a man who was begging her not to call the police! She asked for my phone and, in shock, I handed it to her. They ran all the way through my apartment and  fell on my bed wrestling with each other to get my phone! I had forgotten it was password protected so eventually they gave it to me and left. He kept saying she shouldn't call the police that she was over reacting, but she ran out of my apartment calling back, "Please! Call the police!" I was so scared I locked myself in my apartment and then moved to my bathroom in case one of them had a gun. I wanted as many walls between us as possible. I dialed 911 and they answered. I told the emergency people what was going on and that I needed the police. They said they couldn't find my address! Now this apartment complex is well known in Normal, Illinois and it was on a main street. I couldn't understand how they couldn't find it. It turned out I had forgotten I have a North Carolina phone number! We sorted it out. They transferred me to Normal and about twenty minutes later the police knocked on my door. By this time the couple across the hall were no longer shouting, but I just told the police what had occurred and they took care of it from there. I guess the boyfriend had been living with her and when they had an argument she told him to leave. When he didn't, she over reacted and the fracas began. I never saw him again and she was gone within the month. Ironwood didn't appreciate that sort of renter.

I learned a lot from this encounter. Mainly never open the door when someone is beating on it and screaming, and  remember my phone is connected to a Canton, North Carolina emergency number.

I bought a big round wooden table with legs that folded up when it was not in use and had many birthday and Christmas celebrations here with my daughter and granddaughters. This was an apartment that fit me perfectly.

I decided I would like to have a cat. I went out into the country where they kept dogs and cats that were strays and asked to see the cats. They had a room full and I tried to adopt an older one, but those were all being kept because they thought they could reunite them with their owners. They had some kittens and one was an all black one about nine months old. I picked her up and she purred like mad. I held her and she cuddled right up to me. I fell in love, but to be safe I went back every day and held her for fifteen or twenty minutes for a week, just to be sure I wasn't allergic to her. Eventually I adopted her and named her Annabelle. I put a very large litter box crate in the bathroom and a small litter box inside of it. I cleaned it easily every day and never had littler or any kind of smell in the apartment. But I had to pay a $500 pet fee just for having a cat.

Annabelle was so smart and so playful! She would fetch a little toy mouse and bring it back to me,or chase her feather on a stick and roll around. I had fun making her toys to explore and our only problem in the beginning was that she would attack me at night biting my toes through the covers so hard they bled!  Her only problem was her preference for good leather as a scratching post as opposed to all the alternatives I gave her. I finally just resigned myself to having a holey footstool and I covered the chair. I got my old doggie stroller and took her on walks through the Ironwood neighborhood. When I went to Andy's I hired my granddaughter, Tiffany, to stay with her and care for her. Tiffany said she never saw Annabelle! She was worried she was lost, but I told her as long as the food disappeared it was okay. Annabelle was there. I told her she should let the bathroom faucet drip. Annabelle loved to play with that. She also liked to play in her drinking fountain, but Tiffany still never caught sight of her. That year I folded up the back branches of my little Christmas tree and hung it on the wall so Annabelle could see it, but not climb in it.

Annabelle was probably close to a year when she started getting bald spots. The vet thought it could be fleas even though we didn't find flea dirt on her, so I treated the apartment for fleas. I still don't think fleas were ever a possibility. Annabelle's feet never touched the outdoors, but her bald spots grew and so did our vet visits. They were always over $150 and I just didn't have it. I didn't know what to do. The vet finally suggested that maybe she was allergic to me! That sounded ludicrous, but after nearly eighteen months I found her another home and her bald spots finally went away. That was the last pet I had.

While still living here I joined a Meetup group called Women Wine and Words. You had to go one time to meet some of the women so people knew you really were a woman and then you could join the group. It had a fifty person limit and I was happy to be included. The reason they were so careful was because a man had tried to join the group one time simply to meet women and he turned out to be not so great, hitting on people and annoying them. We did so many things in this group and all of them were optional and usually only attended by a handful of the club at a time. You just picked the things that appealed to you and over time developed a really close relationship with other women who enjoyed the same things. There were set meetings that happened every week like trivia, or coffee, but there were also weekend theater trips and book clubs and wine tasting parties, or game parties. If you wanted to try it you could initiate it and see if people were interested. I was the oldest woman in the group, but interestingly enough my closest friend was the youngest in her late twenties. She was an engineer from Canada and when she moved back there I really missed her. Most of the women were in their thirties and forties and most were professional women of one sort of another. My first breakfast with this group was where I met Kelly who was nursing her baby. We didn't allow children at the meetings, but he was the exception while she nursed. If he got fussy she took him home. One of my other close friends was an intern when we met and hadn't decided what her specialty would be. Today Kelly's baby is in middle school and the intern is a doctor in the quad cities.

I lived at Ironwood for nearly four years and the rent went up annually. I would not have moved otherwise. I loved the apartment and the people and the neighborhood. I enjoyed taking part in their holiday contests like pumpkin carving and other fun things, but when the rent reached over seven hundred dollars I began looking for other apartments. They had smaller efficiencies for rent there, but it would have only been a couple of years before they, too, were sky high for our area. And they were very compact.

Luckily I found a beautiful apartment near the neighborhood where my children grew up.