Escape from Grey Gardens

I make fun of Grey Gardens, Louisiana, but I am actually fond of it. It has grown on me. It was no fun when we moved in and had a freakish cold snap the first week and could see our breath inside. It was no fun to take a shower shivering and standing on an orange crate which left gouges in one's feet because something vile and smelly kept backing up out of the drain, and anyway the well water smelled bad enough. It was no fun the weekend we rented the trencher to get ourselves off the stinking well water and connect to the parish water line and Gary trenched through the only water line we had, then a main electrical cable (which was scary). It was mildly amusing to sit on the porch all dirty and frustrated and wonder aloud where the gas line was and then wonder about going for a hat trick.... but really, no fun there to speak of. It was no fun the morning I thought someone was sampling my yogurt bars in the pantry and putting each one back with a bite or two out of it and then realized with growing horror that "someone" was not human but rodent. It was no fun subsequently stuffing every crack and hole bigger than a pencil with copper wool and getting permanent carpal tunnel with the 4000 tubes of caulk it took to make sure the yogurt bar incident was not repeated. And then the day the wren flew by me, while I was sitting at my desk, inside. Only I thought it was a bat. And it was no fun the months we had assorted carpenters and plumbers and heating and air conditioning fellas trooping in and out tracking in mud mud mud and concrete and sawdust. Mostly nice fellas, except the racist plumbers who sniffed out a liberal Yankee and tried to bait me, but not a one of them had any taste in radio stations and (this little thing drove me crazy) they never turned the darn noisy thing off when they left.

But, since we moved in October 2005, at a time when our corner of the world had gone a little crazy, and there were so many people down here who were living (and many who still are) in horrible places or circumstances--well, we chose our displacement and discomfort, which was nothing at all compared to what happens to you when the levees break and you lose everything. Choosing was a luxury.

I should say that there is a mama skunk, apparently, denning under the Grey Gardens of Louisiana, and we are trying everything to get rid of her, but so far no good. She has a habit of letting loose in the night, and I wake up with my eyes watering and my sinuses on fire. We have tried moth balls (ugh), ammonia, fox urine pellets (don't ask), a "humane trap" baited with apples and peanut butter, cat food, dog food, you name it. We have caught a series of raccoons, really cute American opossums, serially a fleet of armadillos, the odd squirrel, and a bunny, but the skunk has only shown up around the trap once to mock the possum that was trapped inside. Gary and the dogs make rounds in the morning peeing in a circle around the house (maybe don't ask about that either, but it's pretty funny that they seem to have this little ritual down pat, and it's kind of a sweet father-son male bonding activity, in a weird way). This last solution was suggested to us by a friend who is a biochemist at LSU.

This is the kind of thing I mean by feeling myself slipping into Edie-ness. I do not find it strange that my husband and the dogs are methodically surrounding the outside of the house with pee. I do not find it strange that we have a had a giant fallen magnolia tree smoldering in the yard and slowly turning to grey ash for the last 8 days (a victim of Hurricane Rita, it was really cool yard art for a year and a half, and we hacked a lot of not very good firewood out of it this winter, but we're finally getting rid of it the only way we seem to be able to come up with). I do not find it strange that the plastic bag fragment I wedged into what looks like a shotgun hole in one of the parlor windows on the day we moved in is still there. I no longer find it strange that when I walk out back toward the garage Sonny the parrot invariably screams something at me like "Pretty f*ck apple!" (Sonny the parrot has a really filthy mouth--he was abandoned by some students who apparently taught him to curse like a truck driver. We tried replacement therapy, teaching him nice words like "apple" and "pretty bird." Result, he now mixes up his cussing with nice words in surreal combinations.) And there are no neighbors in sight distance, so when I stepped in fire ants once and they were crawling up my pant leg I just took my pants off right there in the yard without even thinking of it as strange. If neighbors do come by, they might be alarmed. I am trying to learn to shoot an English longbow. I'm terrible at it, and it's a little shocking how far the arrows go--way farther than I think they will--talk about affrighting the air at Agincourt--and the bow is much taller than I am, so Gary says it looks really goofy. I seem to dress strangely to do things around the house and outside. All my clothes seem to have paint and plaster and crap on them. When it gets cold I sleep with a hat on.

Since I'm writing and thinking about Grey Gardens the film, something keeps bringing me up short: seeing this movie years ago, I found the Edies delightful but weird, really weird. Now I don't. I don't see them as weird, hardly at all. It can only be that I am becoming an Edie myself.

So this is what we are escaping, for a month: the labor of Grey Gardens. That, and hoping to slow down my own (inevitable?) Edie-fication. One day you're shooting the longbow out back, the next you're doing tap-dance routines for a documentary crew making a movie about how weird you are.

I promise to talk about travel planning next entry. But for me all serious travel (vs. "trips," which are the week with family or the business trip or the weekend excursion) has a motivation that has to be something beyond practicality, education, entertainment. There needs to be--dare I say--some sort of spiritual impetus, or at least some sort of perspective changing trigger. I'm not explaining this well, but I'm quite certain ST folks understand this.

Or maybe it is just high time we got out of here for awhile.