Maynia -- Day Twenty Eight

This is my post for @maynia prompt banana chaser hosted by @kaelci

My husband says "Kids", you raise them, they move out, multiply and move back in. We have had one move out, have a baby, and move back in. Then the same one moves a different partner in with her. We have had one move out and bring a dog with her when she moved back in. Once she moved back out she left the dog, we ended up keeping it for 11 years. But If I said something about the dog she would tell me it was still her dog, nope if a dog is left for that long, it does not belong to you any longer.

This dog was a dachshund named Doby. He was not a small dachshund he was pretty big for his dog type. He was so fat that his belly was only inches from the ground. He had also become blind from cataracts. I came home one afternoon and pulled in the yard, the sun was in my eyes. I will never forget the look on my husbands face as he came running across the yard screaming STOP, I did not know what was wrong so I started to back up and he screams NO. I get out of the truck and ask him what was wrong. He tells me I ran over Doby.

I walked around the truck and saw him lying there, he could not lift the back half of his body. I broke down. I held him and tried to tell him how sorry I was. My husband went into the house and comes out with his gun. he tells me to walk away. I was hysterical crying, it is one of the hardest things I have ever done and I do not think I will ever forgive myself. We had just lost Bear a few weeks before this.

Littleone was the cat that we had for 21 years, between the Rottweiler, Dachshund, and Littleone, I would say Littleone ruled the house if she wanted to lay somewhere and one of the dogs were in her spot she would make them move.

At our old house, my daughters' boyfriend built a playhouse for her son. They left it there when they moved out and the dogs found rats in it. They chased these rats in and out of the playhouse, all the time Littleone sat on the roof of the house watching these silly dogs. We went inside and the dogs followed us. A couple of hours later I went out of the back door, and there laid three rats, all in a pile, by the door. I went back in and told my husband, you have to see this. Littleone showed the dogs that she could catch the rats.

We lived in an old Florida style house, the living room had ten windows, the floors were made of 3/4inch oak that was well worn. This was the house we raised the kids in and had paid off it was 100% ours. We lived in it for over twenty years.

In 2005 hurricane Francis was headed for us and it was supposed to be pretty bad so we went to my brother's place in north Florida. After the storm passed we came home and the only damage we had was that when we left I forgot to close the windows in the living room.

This same year we had another hurricane headed our way, hurricane Jean. We decided to not leave for this one. We had one window that would move a little more with each gust of wind, it did this until it was completely loose. My husband tried to hold it in and then thought that was not a good idea. He let go and a few minutes later the window flew out into the yard but it did not break it.

Later we started hearing something banging on the side of the house and water started coming in everywhere. The only room that did not have water coming in was our bedroom, I went to pulling pictures off of the walls and getting my albums, I threw everything on our bed. My husband calls me crazy because I was putting empty totes under the leaks but in no time they were overflowing. There was water running through the breaker box and we still had electricity. The banging noise we heard was the roofing, it was what they call rolled roofing and it peeled back in one big piece.

We stayed in the house for a couple of days. Then the mold took over and my husband is deathly allergic to it. We pitched our tent in the back yard and had a solar shower out there. The tent was working out fine until we had a front come through and it rained and blew so hard that one side of the tent fell in and we were soaked. My husband told me he did not care how I had to do it but go into the house and get the computer and hook it up in the tent. We had no power but had a generator and we never lost our phone, we had dial-up internet.

He went on the computer and found someone that had an old overpriced camper on the southwest coast and he bought it and we drove over there to get it. We paid them for it and when we hooked it to our truck we found it did not have any tail lights. we asked the people where was the closest auto parts store and had to drive to it with no lights, we bought new lights and wires to run them and that was our home for the next 16 months while we rebuilt the house.

We bought respirators and started tearing everything out of the house, we took it down to where only the studs were there. Then we had to bleach all of the studs to kill the mold. We redesigned it where you could walk in a circle on the inside without going through the master bedroom. The wood floors curled up from all of the water so we rented a floor sander and ended up sanding three large garbage cans full of sawdust, they turned out beautiful. The only things we did not do ourselves was, we did not do the drywall, the roof, or the kitchen cabinets. We put a tile floor in the kitchen and bathrooms we put a jacuzzi tub in one of the bathrooms. The way the house was set up before was you had to go through the master bedroom to go out the back door. we put in French doors in the dining room which adjoined the back porch.

Living in this house for twenty years with no AC or heat and putting central air in it was a real joy. Also wishing I could redesign it and then actually getting to do it was wonderful. I loved everything about it. I could have celebrated with a bottle of rum and a banana chaser.

We lived in it for 6 months, I was unpacking the last of the boxes that we had in storage. A letter came in the mail, it was from the county, they were taking our home, it was not negotiable it would be a total take. Eminent Domain is what they called it. They said they would pay us for it but how do you put a price on the house you raised your kids in and worked so had to make it what it now was.

We turned down their first 3 offers, and they sent a woman to talk to us, we turned down her offer and she was talking to me and wanting to know why I would not accept the offers and I told her the story with the house. I noticed a ring on her finger and told her it was pretty, she said thank you, it was my mother's. I told her what if I took that ring from you? How would that make you feel? That is how I feel about this house. My husband says I threatened her I do not think that is what I was doing, I was just trying to tell her how I felt about something that I cared about. The next time she came she had a man with her. We kept turning down offers until I thought we would have enough money to buy land and build on. They called us into the head honcho's office and he made us an offer we had to take.

We found the land we wanted to buy and found out we could have our house moved to it for 55k. we contacted the county about letting us buy the house and having it moved and they told us no. A few months later someone told me they went by our old house and the county had it torn down. I do not know why they would not let us buy it if they were just going to tear it down. It has been over 12 years now and I have never been back to where the house was at.

After buying the land we did not have enough money left to build a house so we needed to find a trailer to live in. we drove to the middle of the state where there was a place that had repossessed trailers, they were terrible, I had never seen such filth and they wanted a small fortune for them. Needless to say, we did not buy one.

As luck would have it the newspaper had an add for a double-wide trailer that was on school grounds thirty minutes from us. The man the owned it worked for the school and he took a job in another state and needed to sell the trailer, he wanted 35k for it but my husband offered him 30k and he said yes. We went to our bank and told them we needed 30 thousand in cash, their jaws dropped. It took them a while to get that much cash but they gave it to us. We drove to the school and my husband told me to stay in the truck because he did not know what was going to happen since this guy knew we had that much cash with us. My husband went in to talk with the guy and they decided for us all to go to his bank and we could hand the cash to the teller and she would count it and deposit into his account, so that is what we did. We paid a company 10k to move and set up the trailer on our land. We had already paid someone to haul fill in and build a pad for it.

They hauled the trailer here and put it on the pad and anchored it to the ground. We had to have an electric run to it and hired an electrician to do the wiring. He had everything fixed and the trailer had electric. I was in it doing some painting when the power went out. I went outside and opened the breaker box and one of the breakers that cost quite a bit of money was arcing. I called my husband who called the electrician who came right over, I had shut the main power off. He turned it on and saw it an arc. He said that was not supposed to happen, he called his boss who also came straight over. They both said in all of their years they had never seen one of those kinds of breakers do this. They put a new one in and it has been working for the last 12 or 13 years.

We were now living on our new property and I wanted chickens and my husband wanted turkeys, so we bought 6 baby chickens, no roosters, and we got 3 hen turkeys and 1 tom. We would tell the dogs and cat that they were our babies and when they were big enough to let run in the yard, the dogs and cat did not bother them. I would lock them up at night and let them run loose in the day time. We did not want any more chickens is why we did not get a rooster but we did want turkeys. But the turkeys would not lay their eggs in the coop. They wanted to lay them in the middle of one of my plants and if I left the eggs there, they wanted to set on them instead of going in the coop at night. I knew if they stayed outside at night a bobcat was sure to get them.

The tom we called Big Gobbler, he had gotten either too fat or his hips went out because he could no longer stand up to walk. My husband made a sling to put under him and would lift on it helping him walk to the coop at night and in the morning he would walk him to the shade where he kept food and water for him.

One day I heard a noise at my front door and when I opened the door I saw a bobcat attacking one of the hen turkeys and the chickens were attacking the bobcat. when he saw me he ran across the yard towards the woods and all of the chickens were chasing him. This was 2 in the afternoon. He eventually got all of the turkeys. I did not want to keep them locked up 24-7, now I wonder if that was the right thing to do. A neighbor had got a bobcat that was after his chickens and I thought it was the same one but it wasn't.

The chickens died off I am guessing from old age. One lived a long time and it was not the nice one that followed me around, it was the one I called Beady Eyed Bitch. She would look at me with her beady eyes and as soon as I turned my back on her she would attack my ankles. But she loved my husband, every evening she would sit on his lap as he sat outside having his evening beer. Before we lost the dogs and cat they would all sit with him. Beady Eyed on one knee, Littleone on the other, and the dogs sitting on each side of him.