The Arbors

  

I moved into my new apartment at The Arbors.  It was one of those brick buildings that had steps going up or down when you entered. My apartment was ten steps up. It was on a corner of the building and looked out at trees on one side and towards the sidewalk down to the parking lot on the other. Inside was a utility/coat closet and good sized living room with a galley kitchen off the end. A bathroom with a linen closet and a decent sized bedroom. It was all I needed to start out.

In fact, at the start I bought a blow up twin bed and placed it in the living room along with a folding chair and my little television sitting on a moving box with some books in it. That was everything I owned. Little by little I bought some towels, dishes, a few pieces of cookware, silverware, and then I called my sister. She said she and one of her exes would bring my other stuff on his flat bed trailer. They did and he helped me move the mattress up to my apartment, but he dropped his end in a mud puddle along the way, so my brand new mattress was already stained! I fed them lunch and offered to buy gas, but my sister said she'd pay for that. I bought some lovely dark red lined grommet drapes and when my older son, Jim, came, he hung them for me.

Chauncey and I settled in. I could take him out of either one of the buildings two doors and he and I did a lot of walking around that part of town. I signed up with the Retired Senior Volunteer Program at the YWCA and tried out several different jobs. Reading to the preschoolers at the Y seemed like a good choice, but that kind of day care violated so many of the things I felt were important as a former nursery school teacher. I ended up stopping that shortly after I was fingerprinted and bonded and ready to go. I think I went three or four times before the choices the caretakers made for the children made it impossible for me to stay there with a clear conscience.

Then I began volunteering at the Prairie Aviation Museum out on route nine. It was a good fit for me. My job was to put the flag up when I got there, take admission from people who stopped by, answer questions, lead school groups, tours, and do birthday parties where I took everyone on a tour of the building and then outside onto the tarmac to see the planes. I learned a lot of cute stories about Charles Lindbergh and women aviators. I could tell them about the first dirigibles and the history of flight, including some information on the Wright brothers. We had a Link Trainer that was once used by pilots when they were learning to fly and outside we had all kinds of helicopters, jets, and fighter planes. They could sit in our Huey Helicopter and see how many steps it took to walk from the nose of our F-14 Tomcat to its tail. This was a fun job and I met lots of great people doing it. We had Open Cockpit days when visitors got to sit in all the airplanes and we had a smoker where we made barbecue for sandwiches. Most of our volunteers were men who had been in the armed forces, including everyone from cooks, to pilots and we had people who still flew their own planes regularly. Of course the stories they could tell were amazing. One man claimed he could make his little plane appear to fly backwards, even though that was technically impossible.

I had my own story to tell. One day I put the flag up the pole as usual, being careful not to let it touch the ground in the wind out there. I went back inside and a hour or so later got a phone call. The private airport next door wanted to know if I was okay? I couldn't imagine why, but it turns out I had hung the flag upside down, a sign that I was in distress! I quickly took care of that! At the end of the day I had to fold that flag in the correct way and put it away for the next day. Another perk of volunteering here was my old friend, Cathy Bissoondial who was first one of my children's teachers and later part of the group of teachers we camped with every summer, also volunteered here when they needed someone to do birthday parties.

There was one other woman who worked the same job I did, but usually on different days. Suzi and I were both gray haired, older women who could smile and were very well informed, but other than that we looked nothing alike. That is how I learned that all gray haired women look alike to most people. I cannot tell you how many people swore that had spoken to me about one thing or another when it was really Suzi, a woman ten years older and five inches shorter than I was!

One of the men I volunteered with turned out to be very helpful to me. He and I turned up at Gailey's Eye Clinic the same day to have our cataracts removed. Mine went off without a hitch. His lens in his eye shattered and he had an awful time. His wife volunteered in my doctor's office and when he needed a ride to the museum because he couldn't drive, I would go pick him up. When I was old enough to get social security they helped me sign up for the insurance to supplement it. I still use it and am so happy I discovered it.

I continued volunteering here, but I also began to volunteer at the library for Cedar Ridge Elementary school. At first I just checked out books while the librarian taught the classes. Later I shelved books, helped children navigate the stacks and did other miscellaneous things around the library.

Then I also began working with a kindergarten teacher there. I led some of the reading classes and helped out in her classroom whenever she needed an extra pair of hands. 

That meant I was volunteering five and sometimes six days I week.  I was busy and happy and during all this I discovered a new friend.

Andy and I both wrote stories for the same online site and he began emailing me about my stories. I got his first email October 1, 2010 and had no idea that it was the start of a brand new friendship. In many ways he and I were the same person thirty years apart!

In the beginning I had no idea who he really was, but I enjoyed our emails. Later I discovered he was an assistant professor in Nachitoches, Louisiana. He sent me my teddy bear, Bearnard, for Christmas that year and I knit a scarf for him and his tiny teddy bear, Fornia, that I'm sure they never wore in the deep south. We slowly began talking about more than our stories and I eagerly read the books he was teaching in his classes. I also read his thesis and finally one day I drove down there and spent a few days visiting with him.

Meeting Andy changed my life in so many ways. All of them good. 

These were good years. Jim and Jenny had their first child, Corra, and later Sam. One year they came for Christmas and I assumed we would go to her family's house like usual, but it turned out they didn't realize they would be coming to mine until late the night before. That year we had red beans and rice for Christmas dinner, but we also had strawberries dipped in white chocolate which were a huge hit with Corra. She was so little, but her eyes lit up and those little hands reached out as she said, "more, more more!"

I began having foot and ankle problems again. This was not something new. I'd had them to some extent all my life, but they were worse some times. Here it was a problem because I had to go and down ten steps every time Chauncey needed to go out. He seemed to sense my feelings of dread and had to go out a lot more. Eventually I had to sit down and scoot down or up the staircase then hobble in and out the door each time. Having Chauncey was turning out to be too difficult and my sister agreed to take him. She had a fenced in yard and another shih tzu, so it worked out great for all of us.

Becky and her significant other, Joel, lived near our old house on Nicki Drive and I saw them sometimes too, as well as my granddaughters, Brooke and Tiffany. I went with them and his family for the fourth of July one year and it was a lot of fun. When they were evicted they spent a few nights with me before moving in with his brother in Pawnee. Becky was working at State Farm and Joel worked maintenance at the old court house, so she drove into town everyday for work.

I needed a new air conditioner/heater for my apartment and when they put it in it didn't fit quite right. I had a bird that made a nest in it and eventually got into my apartment, creating quite a mess. Then one day I heard screams and when I walked out to my car, I found blood on the sidewalk leading to the parking lot. The next week someone in one of the distant apartment buildings was stabbed during some kind of drug interaction. Add all of this to the steps I had to climb to reach my apartment and I decided it was time to think about moving.

I wanted a place without a lot of steps and thought living in an older apartment might be fun, so I began looking in the historical district around Franklin Park. There were lots of great apartments, but some were way too expensive. Others were more student apartments and either wanted roommates, or were pretty bad, but I finally found one on Chestnut Street that was going to be vacant at just the right time. I gave The Arbors notice that I would not be renewing my lease.