then and now (m)

I've become a landlord since my mother died.  I have inherited her two elderly female tenants.  Two sisters who resemble the characters in Arsenic and Old Lace.  J is the younger, sickly sister who looks and acts 20 years older than her 68 years.  E is the stout older sister with the constant snarl on her face.  Add a dash of female pattern baldness(for both) and you have the picture.

J and E have lived in my mother's house longer than I ever did.  They moved in 44 years ago with their mother and stepfather whom they disliked and tortured with their snide remarks.  When the stepfather died, my father commented, "Lucky bastard."

The sisters hate snow.  It immobilizes them literally and figuratively. 

During the Blizzard of '78, I got off the train from Boston and saw my mother's tenant, E, in the train station with a look of sheer horror on her face.  "How are we going to get home?," she asked.  "The buses aren't running!  We're trapped!  There's no food here!"  Our house was 3 miles from the train station.  "We'll walk," I said.  I was 23 years old and in the prime of my life, fitness-wise.  E was 46 and stout. 

The "walk" turned into me in the front, E holding onto the belt of my coat for 2 miles, dragging me down with her 215-lb bulk.  I felt like an Alaskan sled dog in an iditarod race.

 At the 2-mile mark, I saw a cab stuck in the snow, wheels spinning.  I was desperate to get E off my back.  I told the cab driver we would push him out of the snow and he would give us a ride to the bottom of our street.  The macho jerk said, "No way a girl can push me out of this."  I turned to tell E the plan and wasn't she already sitting in the back seat of the cab?  I pulled her out and told her we had to push the cab together.   She grumbled a bit when I told her the alternative was to walk another mile in the blizzard.  Having had a taste of the inside of the warm cab, she snapped into action and pushed like a woman in labor.

The cab left us off at the bottom of our street, a medium-sized hill.  I pulled E up and dropped her off at the front door where her mother stood ready to greet her 46 year-old "baby."  Meanwhile, my reward from my own mother was a 30-minute nap followed by intervals of snow-shoveling to, as my mother said, "stay ahead of the storm."

Over the years, the job of shoveling the front steps, front sidewalk and two sets of back stairs used to fall on my mother....and by extension, me.  My mother would threaten to go outside and shovel and I'd get in my car and drive the 30 minutes to her house to do it before she did.  When you did a job for my mother, you had to get an "A".  We had the best-shoveled sidewalks on the street. Ditto, the steps.  Couldn't use salt because that would stain the bricks.

My mother would never let us hire anyone to do the work.  Now that she is gone, my brothers and I decided to get someone to help.  Cousin Patty found a kid named Nick who advertised his services on the Dairy Maid sign in our town.  Nick and I negotiated a price and he started the day after the storm this week.

On Thursday, I drove to my mother's house to inspect Nick's work. Front steps looked good (A-), sidewalk (A+ ... he has a snowblower).  So far, so good.  I pulled into the driveway to get to the back of the house. Uh oh.   The tenants' stairs were okay (B+) but my mother's stairs were completely blocked and E's car was buried under a huge pile of snow.  Apparently, the cousins, whom we hired to plow the large driveway, came after Nick shoveled and undid some of his fine work.

I got my shovel out of my car and began shoveling my mother's steps.  I could have stopped there, but E heard me and came to the window of her second floor apartment, a damsel in distress, wondering how on earth she was going to get her car out.  "I'll have to leave the car there until Spring! How will I get around?"

Shades of 1978.

It took me two hours to do both jobs.  My face was red from exertion.  I had to stop a couple of times because my right shoulder was sore.  My knees were throbbing.

When I was done, E, thanked me profusely and said: "Good thing we didn't have to walk from the station today.  Neither one of us would make it!"

And with that remark, I vowed to get in better shape this year.