Little House on Linden Street
by Jan Groft
We pull up to the front of the 1932 brick Tudor, and Randy stops the car but does not turn off the ignition. Linden Street. This is the house; cottage might be a more appropriate word. It is so tiny that I know exactly what my husband is thinking.
“I don’t think so,” he says.
“Let’s give it a chance,” I urge, struggling myself to keep an open mind. “Use our imaginations.”
“Well, if you want to live here, you’re going to have to live here by yourself,” he says. “There won’t be enough room for the three of us.”
Not that long ago, it seems, we were agreeing to plunk down the initiation fees to join a country club, to add a carriage house behind our custom-designed home, to sail the Caribbean in the presidential suite of a luxury cruise liner. There was a time when making these decisions was as simple as pulling the checkbook from a drawer. At the height of our careers, my husband and I both reaped the rewards of owning thriving businesses. Seven years ago, however, I sold my advertising agency for the freedom to stay at home, where I could greet my kindergartner at the bus stop each day, where I would sit at my father’s bedside as he lay dying from leukemia in my sun room, where I would write my first book. My husband’s business has been uncharacteristically sluggish for a year now. And we’re not sure how long we can tolerate living in the throes of a negative cash flow.
And there’s something else. A verse. A little over a year ago, while I was thumbing through the pages of the Bible, a verse jumped out at me, started waving a flag with my name on it. So compelling was this verse to me that I copied it onto a yellow post-it note, stuck it to my dashboard, and prayed it every time I got in the car. Lord, turn my eyes away from worthless things. Preserve my life according to your word.
Now as I take in the mismatched brick on this dollhouse-size home, the lopsided antenna on the slate roof, the air conditioner hanging from the propped window, I am wondering if God is answering my prayer.
My friend Steven’s ear is glued to his cell phone. His stylishly cropped hair is as gray as mine would be if it weren’t for the monthly visits to the hair salon.
“Get the media department on it,” he says, probably talking to one of his account executives. “Tell them to tighten the budget, maybe take television out of the mix.”
Steven is keeping me company at a table in front of Strawberry Square’s B. Dalton Bookseller, where I am signing books. The book was released within days of my family’s move to our smaller home, indicative perhaps that certain life changes are inextricably woven one with another.
Steven and I started our ad agencies around the same time, almost 25 years ago. We experienced the same growing pains, the same triumphs. For 17 years, we swapped stories about everything from client pitches to incessant deadlines, all the while competing for the top spot in our region’s award shows; once we actually shared the honor. His has now grown to be the area’s largest ad agency. Mine, of course, is no longer mine.
The book signing is going slowly. Occasionally a friend or colleague of Steven’s dashes around the corner. Steven waves them over, extols the virtues of my book, never mind the fact that he himself has not yet read it. The friend nods, has me sign the book, buys it. And then Steven is back on the phone.
“How’s the reach with radio? Maybe combine radio and outdoor, keep some synergy going.” He talks on and on, using language I once used myself, language with which I’ve become rusty. Finally, Steven snaps his cell phone shut. He looks directly at me.
“You don’t miss it, do you?”
“No. I don’t. Not even a little.” I say this not because I am ungrateful for a career that was good to me, but because this bend in the path at which I now find myself — with all the snags and bumps along the way — feels like a comfy old robe and favorite pair of slippers that have been waiting for me to return home.
Here in the little house on Linden Street, I remember the first time we stood at the doorway of this room, now my study. It had aged floral wallpaper, a radiator crusty with peeling paint, old metal blinds.
“What would we use this for?” Randy asked.
“I’ll take it,” I volunteered, imagining freshly painted walls and trim, a refinished wood floor, built-in bookshelves. “It could be my study.”
“But it would be depressing,” he said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” I objected. “There are five windows in here!”
A talented architectural designer and friend affirmed the house’s “good bones,” the viability of remodeling on our budget. Still, we were nervous. So when the agent called to inform us another offer was being presented that evening, our hearts started pounding.
“I just want to do whatever God wants,” I said. “I wish he would tell us.” Randy agreed. Within 15 minutes, the kind voice of a friend, a trusted financial advisor, came through the telephone.
“You’re making the right decision,” he said.
Now through my study door, I see the freshly painted living room fireplace flanked by two miniature six-paned windows. These were the windows that, when I first stood taking in their craftsmanship, made me whisper to myself, “I think I can live in this house.”
Though we can’t see the manicured fairway, as we could from our former house, it is a 10-minute stroll to Dosie Dough for blueberry banana bread. A short distance beyond that is a park with a stream and ducks and little stone bridges. There is no in-home theater here like the one we left behind, no three-car garage, no spare bedroom, no carriage house, no neighborhood tennis court, no front gates that require a pass card to enter.
But outside my study windows stands a huge old maple that must have been planted seven decades ago. Our 12-year-old’s study nook at the rear of her bedroom — we call it her “tree house” — looks out onto leafy branches, as if it is perched in the treetops. And one story below in our tiny stitch of backyard, Randy stoops over, warmed by the sun, charting the newly planted flowers that will bloom in our garden come spring.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR A Lititz resident, Jan Groft is the author of a memoir, Riding the Dog.
Lice Lessons
by Valerie Weaver-Zercher
Bugs don’t usually throw me into a panic. I can handle your run-of-the-mill ants, spiders, and even roaches. But when lice decided to drop by our house two years ago, I pretty much freaked out.
“Where do you think you got them?” all our nice, middle-class friends asked. Like them, I prefer to think of our lives as parasite-free zones, to imagine that somehow caste and good hygiene make us immune to vermin. No longer.
My scalp had been itchy for weeks. A dermatologist waved it off as a minor shampoo allergy; my mother determined that it must be my body’s response to stress. So it was with a mixture of relief (that I wasn’t a hypochondriac) and horror (that I was a host organism instead) that I discovered the truth.
I found them first on our one-year-old, crawling around with a sense of proprietorship that I, as a parent, resented. And since I found them about 10pm, there was little to do except spend the night imagining them partying back and forth between our scalps, borrowing beers and can openers. That, and obeying the commandment to be fruitful and multiply.
Lying awake that first night, I realized that I would have to ditch any plans I’d had for the coming week. Instead, it would be anti-lice shampoos for everyone. Washing heaps of clothes. Disinfecting combs and brushes. Bagging up stuffed animals.
And of course, the most time-consuming of all: nit-picking. It’s what you see monkeys at the zoo doing: going through each other’s hair, strand by strand, pulling loose the tiny egg sacs. My husband spent hours combing over my scalp, carefully (and by the fourth night, not-so-carefully) cutting out any strands with nits.
A friend of mine, who spent an afternoon of nit-picking, commented with some nostalgia on what we’ve lost since the days when lice were common. “I mean, think of all the millennia in which people have done this ritual, enjoying each other’s company while combing through each other’s hair,” she said.
I harrumphed a thank-you for her nice little thought, but said that I’d take modern alienation and an itch-free scalp any day.
Looking back, though, I think she was right.
There my husband and I sat, every night for a week, engaged in an intimate, almost primal act. Recently we’d been too busy working and taking care of kids and getting ready to move to actually sit down and talk. Now we were forced to do it — albeit with a nit comb and plastic bag, rather than candles and tea. So it’s not the most romantic way to spend an evening; still, who’s to say that parasite removal isn’t as good for a marriage as dinner and a movie?
Admitting that my children and I had become host organisms wasn’t easy. But just as lice forced us into new patterns of intimacy, so too they forced me to remember a truth I often forget: that is, that the natural world isn’t just pretty cardinals at the feeder or deer tracks in the snow. It’s a whole lot messier, a whole lot uglier, and a whole lot meaner.
Most of us would rather forget about the parasites, predators and scavengers that occupy essential places in our planet’s ecological web. We prefer our nature declawed and obedient. Lawns, rhododendrons and house pets are fine — as long as they’re manicured, trimmed and house-trained. Give us the English gardens of Thomas Kinkade, not the skulls of Georgia O’Keeffe. Give us chickadees, not cowbirds; ladybugs, not lice.
Granted, a little wildness has become acceptable — even chic. Wilderness outfitters are booming, filling the backpacks and campers of Americans who, apparently, are hiking, canoeing and fishing in unprecedented numbers (or maybe just needing more stuff to do so).
Outdoor supply stores sell us the bonsai version of the Great Outdoors, offering conveniences like handheld GPS units and exotic meat gift sets. Merchandising can be one more way to keep the natural world caged and controlled, to make it seem a little less capricious, a little more pretty.
Think I’m overstating the case? Ask Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk whose nest was removed several years ago from a posh Fifth Avenue apartment building because he happened to be a messy eater.
Apparently he hadn’t installed his indoor plumbing yet, and he couldn’t keep the crumbs of his rat and pigeon meals inside his nest. (Perish the thought that New Yorkers who live in 18‑million-dollar apartments should have to step over any reminder of predatory practices.) But like our lice, who held on for a week or so with a tenacity I could only admire, Pale Male and his mate Lola didn’t give up easily.
Thanks to advocacy from birdwatchers and others who think nature shouldn’t come shrink-wrapped with moist towelettes on the side, the hawks got another crack at raising a family. Their nest was re-hung, along with guardrails to catch any detritus, and Pale Male and his mate are well on their way to becoming movie stars.
A documentary about them is winning awards at film festivals around the world, and numerous websites are devoted to almost hour-by-hour reports of their movements (“At 2:30pm, while Lola was on the nest, Pale Male brought a twig and stayed for some time, fixing and tweaking”).
It’s a heck of a lot easier to love a hawk than a louse, of course. And I’m hardly ready to spearhead a “Honk 4 Headlice” campaign — in fact, I was more than ready to try any and all remedies to rid ourselves of them, from scary chemical shampoos to the mayonnaise-under-a-shower-cap routine.
But I’m becoming convinced that when we view nature as pretty, pleasant and kind, we are prone to dismiss it, like a cute niece we can pat on the head and send away. And from dismissal, it’s a short distance to disrespect, then disregard, then domination.
So I’ve begun to see our lice as messengers of sorts, carrying communiqués from the natural world that I’d been too busy to hear: You’re not in control. This world you inhabit is not yours alone. They’re not messages I enjoyed receiving, and not messengers I want to run into again.
But I do need to thank them — posthumously, of course. They reminded me that the natural world is less sedate than I like to imagine, and that the mighty Homo sapiens can be consumed — not merely by passion or worry or guilt, but by, quite literally, a lousy bug.
Note to self: Remember these lessons. Note to vermin: no reminders necessary.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Valerie Weaver-Zercher, Mechanicsburg, is a writer and editor and the mother of three young boys. “Several months after writing this piece, I contracted a mild case of Lyme disease,” Weaver-Zercher says. “Perhaps the parasitic powers-that-be thought I needed another reminder.”
