My first 56 Years

She called the sheriff and they were sending a car out. She apologized and said she'd call them and tell them it was a false alarm. They came out anyway and I brought Chuck into the house to show them he was ok and that my husband had the car at work. They said they would still have to write up a report because a neighbor had called to complain. They also told me that our little Pekingese was walking away from the house as they pulled up. His name was Dusty and the dog pound gave him to me because he was blind. They were having a hard time selling him and it was getting near the time to put him down. I asked Chuck if he wanted to take a ride in the police car to pick up Dusty. We climbed into the back of the police cruiser and there was Dusty lost, thinking he was going home and instead he was getting farther away.
When we first got Dusty Charles and I took him to Manhattan where they have a veterinary training facility to see if they could restore his eyesight. They said "no" that this was a common ailment in Pekingese dogs because the eyes tend to bulge out and get covered with dust and other particles in his environment. They are more prone to infections. They told me to keep eye drops in his eyes and to keep them moist. Dusty didn't seem to mind his dilemma except for the occasional times he would get lost, he was a happy dog. Chucky and Dusty were inseparable. Dusty was so cute, blond or buff as dog owners would say. Short legged and long with a big feather tail. He had a massive overbite and his teeth would appear as a snarl when he was just sitting. He would sit and beg for treats and was semi house broken, it was hard to tell because Charles wouldn't let me keep him in the house long enough to find out.
One Saturday morning Charles and I woke up and there was smoke coming through the vent in our bedroom. I told him to get up and go down to the basement and fix the damper, as he usually had to do when the wind would blow and the smoke would go back into the heating ducts instead of out the chimney where it was supposed to go because the damper would get stuck and not open. He got up and headed to the hall outside the door and I could hear him yelling, “Jenny! Jenny!"I said "My God, what’s the matter?” He said, “The hallway is filled with smoke and it's coming from Jenny's room!” I jumped up and hollered for Jenny and she came up the stairs wrapped in a blanket, rubbing her eyes. She simply said “What?” He made it into her room where the smoke was so thick and greenish, he couldn't breathe or see but he knew there was a window on the east side of her room, just across the room the room on the west side was her bed, On the bed was an electric blanket. He opened the window and the smoke went out so he could see what started the whole thing. He looked at the bed and in the middle of the bed was a big black hole. The electric blanket was curled up in the middle of the bed. He unplugged the blanket and noticed some wires were broken. Jenny always curled up tight in a fetal position when she slept.
I asked Jenny why it was that she happened to be up at 6 o'clock in the am on a Saturday when there was no school. She said she had a dream that if she didn't get up the big black hole in the middle of her bed would swallow her up, so she got up. She didn't know that there really was a big black hole in the middle of her mattress. He poured water in the middle of the mattress and carried the thing down the staircase and out the front door. As soon as the air hit that mattress it burst into flames, right in the middle of the front yard! We thank our lucky stars every day that Jenny had the insight to get up on a Saturday morning when there was no school. We always thought that old house was haunted. She believes a ghost warned her.
We were always "seeing" forms walking down the stairs when we were in the front room watching T.V and our eyes would be diverted to the staircase. I wasn't the only one that would comment on the outlines of forms of people going up and down the stairs. They must have been friendly because nothing bad ever happened that would leave one to believe an "evil" spirit lived there. If anything, the warning that Jenny got to get up when her bed was burning on a day she would normally have slept until nine or ten o'clock was a good sign we had nothing to fear and we were very grateful "they" were there if indeed "they” were.
We had bought decorative paneling and wood paneling to improve the looks of the place when we first moved there. It needed clothes and items hauled off that the previous renters had left there. We made many improvements on the property since we moved there. One day Mr. Finney came over to see the inside of the place and saw all the improvements and decided to raise our rent from 50.00 a month to 80.00 a month. That angered us because we paid for all the improvements and the labor we did by ourselves. Plus all the hard work of cutting down trees every weekend and cutting and stacking firewood just to keep warm in the winter! So we said we were moving.
We said goodbye to the place in 1983.We loved the varnished oak staircase that curved at the landing and spilled out into the hallway, the big bathroom upstairs and the half bath downstairs in the kitchen, the big dining room where we had had Thanksgiving dinner and Christmas dinner that Kathryn had to fix that year because I had the Flu and couldn't get off the couch. I had always fixed the holiday dinners but I knew I wouldn't be able to do anything that year. I cried and apologized, Kathryn fixed dinner that year without a complaint! I could hardly eat anything. Everything was so delicious looking and I couldn't bear the thought of trying to keep any of it down.
We found a small house on the same main road just east of the big house, south of Della and Charlie’s. We’d sold the cows and the pigs. The chickens got eaten by foxes and weasels. Jenny was 10 yrs old and Chuck was four. We brought King and Dusty and a pure white cat named Angel. We had a cockatiel that was born a month before Chucky in September of 1979.We had a 10 gallon fish tank. In it we had an albino catfish that was about 10 inches long.
The living room had a bay window that looked out toward the road. The rooms were small. It had two bedrooms. Jenny and Chuck had bunk beds that Charles had made and the other bedroom was so small! We had a water bed that we had bought in 1981 when we were both working at Friskies. Charles started making water bed headboards in his spare time.