It's a bit surreal, this, after a few nights couch surfing to end up here.
The owner's girlfriend, her father just died...74...unexpected, out of the blue, last week...the house, it's unoccupied, in the NE corner of the city, last 'burb before Stoney Trail, a bad hood filled with the tiny boxes that would forever inspire one against home ownership...
It's bleak. The fridge is full, packed with foods that will never be eaten. He wasn't expecting it either. A lunchbox, packed for the no-tomorrow. A bologna sandwich that slowly turns green over my extended weeks. The basement, he was a proper doomsday prepper, there are stacks of toilet paper, canned goods, potato chips, every imaginable supply to get you comfortably through the first months after a nuclear holocaust. Think "Cloverfield Lane". And there's the liquor, fully stocked as well, multiple bottles of all the bar standards, Vodka, Gin, Rum, Dark Rum...other, stranger liquors, "You'd be doing me a favour..." she tells me, "watching the house and all, and seeing that the walks are shoveled and it looks lived in...",... "Never mind I'll take it" I tell her.
There's no internet here, and I've recourse only to the liquor in the basement and the few books I've packed along and a few more I find along the way...
Not that there's that much time. I'm mostly at work, 12 hours a day, it's not worth the returning home between shifts, traffic, the 20 KM drive, better to stay at work, really, it's just a place to sleep.
But I need more than that. 5 weeks here, staring down the kittens and the merry monks, it's making me mad...
There are cabinets filled with the knick-knacks and collectibles of yesteryear...
Every bathroom is filled with crocheted cozies, to hide the toilet paper, to catch the splashes from the sink, the shower, every bathroom is a living bacteriological mat...
The indecency of toilet paper, discreetly concealed beneath a fashionable red crocheted top hat...
I know, my grandparents had their place similarly done, it was an era, for sure, the make-work and home-improvements done by the dutiful housewife...
There are the innumerable stuffed animals, the kind you won at fairs a long time ago, stuffed with sawdust, and there are the trophies (bowling, other), old family photos, there are the "collector plates" painted with kittens and statues of princesses and kittens all mounted upon the shelves and ledges...
...and even a rather competent oil pastel of a kitten in the bedroom...
I hate it, but I have to grudgingly admit the artist clearly knew their kittens.
The house, it's haunted, finish you're 12 hour shift, come home, avoid touching anything, doing anything, sit at the little encampment you've set up at the kitchen table and drink. Make your notes as you descend even further into the underworld. Read, if you've postponed the drinking, your book, because there's no internet here, no diversion from intelligent thought, realize how far you've fallen, the internet, the sum of all knowledge in - at best - 10 page paragraphs,, it's a different sort of knowledge, knowledge of many superficial things, mostly regarding science and politics, but nothing of depth...
...and without it's distraction, with only the book in front of me and the percolating recollections of notes I used to write, things that used to interest me, and it slowly dawns that I'm becoming shallow...
And it's haunted. When I moved in I closed all the doors to the rooms I would not be entering, the closet door in the master bedroom, did not want to be responsible for cleaning when I left. But a few mornings, a few shifts when I return home from work, the closet door is slid wide open, there's no explanation, there's nothing in there that I need, it doesn't open without considerable force, have to pull it, remount it on it's hinge, before I can coax it into opening, nothing in here at all, the dead man's clothes, but I go to bed it's closed, wake up and it's open, and this is curious.
5, almost 6 weeks. More than I can stand. Not my house, I throw away the food that's obviously turning in the fridge, clean up after myself, time to go. This is madness.