The water level in the river has have gone down, but as we drove East, a steady rain seemed to follow us. I am so sick of rain! After a couple of hours on the road, I got to see the house Aunt Lina had chosen, the school I’d be attending, and the town we’d be living in. The experience was….how should I put this….interesting? Eye opening? Refreshing? Peculiar? Perhaps it’s all of the above.
The house is—a house. Duh. The kitchen is smallish, and the living room is too. The two bedrooms are large, and the dining room has a round wall that bows out, with cabinets in the two corner ends of the bow. The wood’s not painted over, and the floors are hardwood. The enclosed back porch has a wood-burning stove that the business- suit-high-heel- wearing real estate lady sang the praises of as she wrinkled her nose. That was amusing. She obviously found the idea of such a stove dirty and distasteful, yet it was a selling point and she was gonna do her damndest to use it to sell.
Aunt Lina tends to be inscrutable to most people. I knew that she wanted the place, but this woman wasn’t sure. I asked Aunt Lina if I could look around the town as she and Miss Business-suit discussed particulars. I took Aunt Lina’s cell phone, and headed to find the Horseneck Nature Sanctuary, the wooded patch I’d seen on Google Earth when I looked.
I have a pretty good sense of direction. It’s five blocks away – I have to pass fifteen houses to get there. I can’t go through yards to get there; not only would that not be neighborly, but there were also several fences around some of the yards, and I could smell about eight dogs that lived in the area. Several of them set to barking as I passed their houses. One pup, a German Shepard, out in a fenced-in yard despite the drizzle, began to bark when I was a few houses away. He got up and began to jump at the fence as I passed, so I stopped and stared him down. At first the barking got wilder, then I exhaled heavily, and he stopped, midbark. He made a whiny sound and slunk back behind the house, with his tail between his legs.
“I don’t know what you’ve got honey, but you should bottle it and sell it. I didn’t think anything could shut Chester up!” An older woman was sitting on the front porch of the house after the dog’s. She smiled and nodded, and I waved and nodded. Well, there was one friendly soul in White Cedars.
I found the entrance to the sanctuary grounds, but there was yellow tape with the words “Caution – do not pass” strung between two trees barring the way. A sign on a post said “Sanctuary Closed –Wet Ground and Fallen Trees,” so I turned around and walked back to the house with the “For Sale” sign out front. It’s a cute little place – the front of the ground floor was made of stone, with blue vinyl siding covering the outside of the second floor. The roof is a greyish color. The place is OK, I guess, and would probably look better on a sunny day, but I kinda like the farmhouse with its five bedrooms, front and back parlors, porches, and pantry. This place looked like the place next door (except that it was brick and white instead of stone and blue). And like another across the street, and a few down the block….suburbia. Ugh.
Aunt Lina and Miss Business-suit were done with whatever papers needed signing, and the real estate agent was talking about how much I would “love” the small town atmosphere of White Cedars, and how “good the schools were”, yadda yadda… I wanted to scream. Aunt Lina saw that, and winked. She cut the chit-chat short by saying that I needed lunch, and then we went to this place on the town’s main drag, Overbrook Pike Road. We found this sandwich shop, across from the park, called The Knight Brothers Deli, where she had a burger and I had soup and a roast beef and cheddar on rye. There were some older kids having lunch at a nearby table – apparently they let the students go out to lunch here. Or maybe these kids were “cutting” class. But would they be so brazen as to sit in a place not far from City Hall and the police station?
After lunch we walked the block-and-a-half down Overbrook Pike Road to the “middle school”. Aunt Lina keeps calling it “junior high” because I suppose that’s what they called them when she went to school. We had to ring a bell and a buzzer rang to unlock the door remotely. It was like I imagined a prison would be. We went to the “front office” where Aunt Lina spoke to a gaggle of secretaries, who introduced us to the principal, a Mr. Yevetski, who told us that we’d have to have our school district contact the White Cedars district. When Aunt Lina told him I was homeschooled, his eyebrows shot up, he wrinkled his nose and began to talk about “comparative test scores”. I hate being talked about as if I were an object, so I decided to ask a question of him.
“What kind of World History do 12-year-olds study here? Are they reading Russian Literature? And how about Chemistry? Are they doing independent labs here?”
Mr. Yevetski looked at me as if I’d sprouted an extra head. Aunt Lina’s eyes were glaring, but her mouth was twitching a little in the left corner. That meant a laugh was being suppressed.
Suddenly this loud alarm bell rang, and I jumped. A dull roar sounded outside the office. I looked through the glass doors of the office-- a swarm of bodies surged through the hallways like sludge through a drainpipe. My God! There were so many of them!
There was a dull thud as one boy pushed another right into the glass doors. Mr. Yevetski excused himself (probably relieved that he didn’t have to answer my questions), and went out into the fray. Aunt Lina was given school contact information from one of the ladies at the front desk, then we slipped out of the office, through the throng of students and out the door. I breathed in the damp air, relieved to be out of there. How was I going to handle that, every day?
We went over to the White Cedars School Administration Office, which was back by the house we’d probably be living in soon. As Aunt Lina talked to more office ladies, I looked at the trophies, old black-and-white photos and other sports paraphernalia in a glass case in the hallway. There was a mural of a knight on a white charger, wearing green armor, with a banner proclaiming “Go Green Knights”. I guess it’s more imaginative than some other High School mascots I’ve seen: animals like mustangs, rams, colts, tigers, wolverines, or even dubious occupations, like the lumberjacks, astronauts, or hillbillies. Not that I’m the rah-rah sporto type anyway. Not my thing. I suppose I’ll have to pretend to like football and baseball in order to fit in.
What if I don’t fit in? What if I don’t try to change in order to be “typical”? I could just be myself, and if these suburban kids don’t like me, then it’s their loss. I didn’t need them before…why should it matter now?
I thought about it on the ride back home – I mean back to PA. I suppose it’s not really “home” anymore. I wonder if I’ll ever think of NJ as “home,” or if Pennsylvania will always hold that place in my heart. Only time will tell.
Until my next post…
Randi
No comments:
Post a Comment