Our dream of wooded acreage and convenient shopping was slightly marred this week by a gas leak that nearly killed us all in a giant blue whumph. The straight-from-cental-casting hillbilly who came to fix it looked at the situation and quickly surmised, “Just open the window to smoke a cigarette and kaboom.. —- But,” he added wisely, “Let’s not think about that.”
Thank god we’re all non-smokers!!
We started sleeping here a week ago Thursday. We’ve been somewhat camping here sans the vast majority of our furniture, because we’ve been showing our old house furnished in the hopes of selling it. So it’s been sort of rustic, and we’ve all had moments where we’re, say, washing our hands with shampoo, or eating dinner on new Isaac Mizrahi plastic dishes from Target alongside grandma’s heirloom silver. Incongruity is the word of the week.
I started smelling the gas the first night when we all bedded down in the so-called master suite on the first floor. It was a hot night with the window open and fan on, and occasionally this waft of gas would flow over us. I recognized it as gas right away, that first moment, but denial and exhaustion combined to make me just ignore it and fade off to sleep. I should add some confusing factors: it was our first night in an unfamiliar environment; we live on a natural gas well, literally, and are paid monthly for the gas that is pulled from under our land. Ben pointed this out when I mentioned the smell of gas, and aided my denial by claiming a) that it wasn’t gas, and b) that it was just gas from our land. I pointed out that natural gas from the land is unscented, it’s only smellable after the gas company makes it so. But I was also confused by the story recently in NYC of the gas smell that swallowed the city mysteriously for a few days and later turned out to be harmless marsh gases.
Anyway, each night as I fell asleep, I would smell the gas, drift off, and in the morning hit the ground running like crazy with moving madness and two small children, never smelling it by day, forgetting about it completely, and then again, at night, smell it and remember that something had to be done just as I was going unconscious. This went on like this until Memorial Day, four nights of it! Then finally on Memorial Day I woke up, remembered the gas leak problem and finally called the gas company. They came out immediately, found the leak, and shut off the gas. Only then did I realize retroactively how incredibly dangerous it had been.
We had been sleeping with our children under gentle breezes of gas atop a crawl space probably filled with gas. The baby could have been killed just by breathing it! We all could have been killed when this particular room, with all of us in it, went kaboom.
But, let’s not think about that.
It’s fixed now, and all that’s left of the situation is lingering anxiety about what might have been, rage towards the inspectors who missed it, and wrangling with the insurance company who is unwilling to pay for the obviously covered repair.
Otherwise, our new life is pretty good. It has fully dawned upon me that we live in the suburbs. We don’t live in one of those treeless, soulless, conformity inducing sorts of suburbs, but it’s still… well, a wonderful compromise between rural and urban. Suddenly the whole question of what's appealing about the suburbs seems stunning obvious. NOW I get it. We have unblemished views from all our windows. We have neighbors who are there, but concealed by tall stands of old trees. We have a creek well stocked with minnows and baby salamanders, and the woods, although all clapped up with poison ivy, are also dewy and beautiful with blooming phlox. Peonies! Rhubarb! And yet, a merest ten minutes away there is such a valley of shopping that I am continually amazed by its stunning ease and variety. It’s a monument to consumption and a guilty pleasure.
It underscores how inconvenient and unfamily-friendly our urban life had become. When we used all the bars and restaurants, they were wonderfully close by, but now we never get to eat out and the drunken partiers are just a nuisance. When we didn’t need Target as much as our right arm, it didn’t matter that it was a long highway drive away (to the suburbs…) (Although they’ve just opened a new one within striking distance…)
Ghostwise I should mention that all is is fine. I think it was our second night here that I had to be alone with just the baby for a few hours after dark. Terrifying… there were literally things going bump in the night, and then—I kid you not– a light started turning itself off and on. Our puckish poltergeist had my hair standing on end. I called Ben in his car (coming home with Isaac from a late concert) and insisted that he talk me down. But the next day the light continued to do it, even in daylight with the man of the house on hand to witness it, and it started to seem a lot more like an electrical problem. And now, after a week of living here, I’m certain that any ghost that was lingering in the great room has been completely exorcised by the nearly continuous loop of “the Magic Schoolbus: Bugs, bugs. Bugs!” No 19th century ghost could tolerate that. I’m from this century, it benefits me in that it contains Isaac for a short (educational!) time, and I can barely tolerate it.
I’ve been a single parent all weekend because Ben had to go to Connecticut for the burial of uncle Will’s body. It’s been fairly grueling without a moment of freedom whatsoever. I’ve had a chance to write this blog only by being interrupted ever other sentence, losing my temper, separately getting apples, blueberries, whales-n-guppies organic cheddar crackers, milk, changing the DVD from “Scooby Doo Meets Batman” to the Muppet show, and nursing off and on. Even still, my “time” such as it was, is up.