Toil Under the Sun (Or How to Catch a Duck)
when the darkness closes in and you are unprepared part 2
We had passed through the fire and were standing on the other side! Maybe smelling a little of smoke…but not dog crap…Praise God! This part of the job was more fun than the first half. Rebuilding is our specialty! I picked paint colours, flooring, kitchen and bath fixtures as well as trim, doors and kitchen cabinets. We had to rip out my parents’ kitchen cabinets. They were old tired and it would be a lot of work to replace the chewed doors. I remember my uncles and grandfather helping my father install them when I was around three years old. My grandfather built them. There was a small cabinet beside the sink and one of my uncles said it was a hat shelf, took his hat off and put it in the cabinet and closed the door. I can still remember them laughing. Before that my mom had a sideboard for dishes and pantry and did most of her meal prep and dishwashing on the kitchen table. My husband has built many kitchens over the years so I designed the layout, similar to the old kitchen but with an added pantry on the wall on which my mother’s china cabinet had stood. The first job was painting all the ceilings and walls, then the cabinet doors which we ordered as plain maple and all the trim and doors. As the painter. I was up next. My son Austen and my friend Dee were my faithful assistants! At great cost, but at emotional peace, I found matching hickory flooring and my husband began to install the wood in the living room and the vinyl flooring through out the house. It was so much nicer to be covering all that mess in new stuff! If you missed the first part of the story, you can read it here.
God sent his angels to help in unexpected ways. I guess the first part which I write about here sounded pretty bleak and it was but there were fun parts. One angel sent from above was an old friend of my father’s who was his age….so nearly 90 and still worked every day moving houses and portables for a schoolboard over an hour away. To say Les was a bit rough was an understatement. He showed up wearing the same grease-stained clothing every day, he had missing teeth and cursed like a sailor! But he was a huge help! He moved all the steel for me, for the price of the steel, found buyers for many things Sam left behind and kept me in the loop as to her goings on with the dogs. He had a skid steer and a float trailer, both of which proved to be quite handy for the cleanup. He took to calling me early every Saturday morning and told me some great stories from when he and my dad were young. He showed me the large bow beam holding up the lean-to on the side of the shop and how my dad bought it from a church that was being torn down and how they moved it. I attempted to curb his swearing habit by speaking to him about the gospel, but it hardly slowed him down. Of course, the other angels were my friend D and her daughter. D may have had her reservations about Les, but she was called to be his angel on a morning that I was picking up material, arriving late and he attempted to change the skid steer bucket to the forks without help. He pinched his hand between the forks and the 4” x 4” blocks of wood they were sitting on and had to holler for help. She was weed eating, but stopped, heard him yelling, and rushed over to help move the forks off his hand which now had 3 broken fingers. She got him cleaned up and his hand bandaged and advised him to go to emergency, which he did…eventually. However, he had to finish his day’s work first. They don’t make them like that anymore.
Then there were the birds. Ducks to be exact. Sam had several ducks on the property and managed to catch a couple and take them, however one evasive duck was left behind for me to deal with. My son named her Kitty. It seemed like a rather unnatural name for a duck, but it stuck! Kitty was living her best life, with the pond to herself and all the feed she could eat. But as the fall wore on and the pond began to freeze, I grew desperate. We had tried all manner of traps. And when I called her by name she would come right up to me and eat at my feet, but as soon as she saw a trap…she was out of there! I tried nets, disguised cat carriers and finally a cage with a rope attached to a door that dropped down. Success at last! Les found me a home for her at Duck Paradise and we went to visit her the following spring. It turned out that Kitty was actually a male duck and fathered some ducklings. Technically that made me a duck grandma!
She comes when she’s called!
My friend D stuck it out with me until the bitter end. She is lovely…but oh so clumsy! And she will admit to this! I feared for her safety. One day she was painting trim and fell into the hole in the floor where the furnace vent cover was to go! She was fine other than limping around for a couple of days but it scared me! We finished pressure washing the shop which took days but finally were finished! And then this little building beside the shop manifested itself as a make work project! It housed a woodstove and had insulated overhead venting that ran into the upstairs of the wood shop to heat the woodworking area. I had to make sure that the furnace worked and of course, the dogs had been housed in there as well. When we did the first cleanup in 2016, my brother and the other guys had cleaned it out, but not very well. Kind of like a bunch of twelve year old boys. Good enough—let’s go play! One side of the building had a loft area that was full of boxes. After we pressure washed it, it still smelled horrible….but it wasn’t dog smell…it was raccoons! I got a ladder and climbed up to see what was in the loft. Sometimes, ignorance is bliss! My parents had run a fruit stand for many years before they moved the house and my father had stacked up fruit boxes in the loft, some filled and others empty. They were no longer empty. Every box was filled with raccoon crap! They had crawled through the venting from the shop and nested there. I know raccoon feces to be extremely toxic. Did you know that around 700 children a year in the US go blind from playing around raccoon latrines in low-income tenements? The feces carry round worm eggs which can be inhaled or picked up on the hands, ingested and they travel to the brain and affect the eyes.
In the U.S. there are approximately 1,000 cases of ocular larva migration seen annually, with about 700 of these cases resulting in permanent blindness. 1
I know this because we took in a baby raccoon when my children were young. I had to treat all my kids with parasite herbs after speaking with man from an animal rehabilitation center. I also had two baby raccoons that I raised to adults when I was young. Thank goodness I was not infected!
D and I suited up with protective suits and N-95’s and tackled the loft! It was such a difficult job. We had to climb up there and pull down all the boxes, load them into a wheelbarrow and cart them off to the burn pile. There were sheets of aspenite under the boxes that needed to come down. We had to saw some up with the Sawzall to get them out. That was particularly fun! Holding the Sawzall over your head while balancing on a ladder as the debris vibrated on the plywood overhead and rained down on top of us…one sawing, the other holding us on the ladder and catching the pieces as they came down! It was a real bonding experience!
Life outside of the jobsite trundled on. I recently looked through my photos from that fall to refresh my memory and realized that we had a very fun-filled and action packed fall outside of this awful job! I hosted a Mexican fiesta 65th birthday party for my cousin. I also held a gathering for my youngest son’s 20th birthday. We found time to visit Appleland with my daughters and the Littles. I hosted a great Thanksgiving (second Monday in October here in Canada) meal with around 15 family members. Misha’s birthday combined with a Halloween party in which I managed to make a Stranger Things costume for my youngest son, my husband…and myself. My husband dressed up as Sheriff Hopper, I went as Joyce Byers and my son as Steve in his Scoops Ahoy outfit, which I sewed up in my spare time! Please don’t come at me about Halloween. We have since pretty much ignored the holiday except to visit the grandbabies in their costumes. We are a dress-up family. One day I’ll write a post about all the costume parties we had over the years. I hope we have many more! My daughters and me closed down a long-time favourite Italian restaurant that we had many memories from over the years. We attended a symphony in the city where my son attended Bible college and he was asked to play upright bass! It was a spectacular concert! My daughter hosted Sinterklass for us on December 5th! God has blessed me with a beautiful family. It’s good to look back and remember all the amazing things we did when the kids were still home!
My husband and I found the time to go deer hunting on my father’s property in the Bruce peninsula and through a stroke of God’s intervention, I was able to shoot my first deer from my father’s hunting cabin which was a really emotional moment for me and brought a sense of healing. Perhaps not for Bucky, my small buck that I shot. Maybe I’ll write about that as well as it was a series of events that only God could orchestrate. Or my inexperienced hunting partner and husband who left his new rifle with scope behind the front door when we packed up and then his shotgun jammed twice. I field dressed Bucky myself and skinned him in our outdoor kitchen. As I said, a tale for another day. When I dropped off Bucky at the abattoir, I gave cutting instructions to a young guy who apparently wasn’t paying attention because when I picked it up 3 weeks later, the entire animal except the backstraps had been made into sausage and pepperettes! My cousin was with me and jokingly said, “Are you expecting the Zombie Apocalypse?”
Well, it was November 2019.
Some areas required unusual tactics to clean. The floor in the upstairs of the garage was so badly stained by the poop bombs that I resorted to using hair dye bleach mixed up and painted on the stains, left for a few hours and then washed off. It really cleaned up the stains and we were saved the expense of refinishing the floor. The well had to be tested and treated and we finally got a clean sample back after a few tries.
We pushed to finish the majority of the house just before Christmas. We returned the week after Christmas in order to clean the house and remove the tools so that I could take photos and list it. I decided to sell it myself. It was in a rural area where prices were not great, but I loved the property and wanted to live there. It was 2 bedroom and perfect for a retired couple. Or someone with a business that could use the shop. I had many offers throughout the fall—some laughable and one serious from the son of a friend that I wished I could have accepted but was far too low. Les even brought around a guy who was buying up local properties for mushroom farms for the Asian market. I don’t believe that the grow ops were legal as he showed up in a Mercedes with a briefcase full of cash in the trunk!
I was able to host my mom’s 90th Birthday at the house! The house felt empty and echoed but it was amazing to have one last gathering with family in their home!
I wanted to list the property as soon as possible as a private sale. After the final cleaning and Kitty found a new home, I was driving down every week to show it. The market was strange being 2020 and during early lockdowns, there were limited properties and buyers were wary. Perhaps they feared not buyers being able to sell their own property? The biggest issue buyers had with the house was that it was only two bedroom. I had two offers that eventually fell through. Finally, in the summer, I listed it with a local agent. Prices had gone up and we sold in a few weeks for a great price! I so badly wanted it to go to a family I wanted visions of children or grandchildren playing around the pond. However we found that it was sold to an Asian investor who ran grow-ops in the area. I wondered if anyone would even live there, stand at the sink in front of the corner window, watching the birds flit around the pond and the late day sun shone gold through the trees.
I hated all my toil in which I toil under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to the man who will come after me, and who knows whether he will be wise or a fool? Yet he will be master of all for which I toiled and used my wisdom under the sun. This also is vanity. So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun, because sometimes a person who has toiled with wisdom and knowledge and skill must leave everything to be enjoyed by someone who did not toil for it. This also is vanity and a great evil. What has a man from all the toil and striving of heart with which he toils beneath the sun? For all his days are full of sorrow, and his work is a vexation. Even in the night his heart does not rest. This also is vanity. There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God,
For to the one who pleases him God has given wisdom and knowledge and joy, but to the sinner he has given the business of gathering and collecting, only to give to one who pleases God. This also is vanity and a striving after wind.
Ecclesiastes 2:18-24, 26 ESV
https://www.greensboroughvets.com.au/news-veterinary/general-info/roundworm-in-humans.html#:~:text=In%20the%20U.S.%20there%20are,cases%20resulting%20in%20permanent%20blindness.
Great network of friends!