The Lamps

I never saw Joanna move into her unit in our townhouse development. But from my kitchen sink, I could look out the window and see her fenced backyard crammed full of boxes, crates and garbage cans. The reason I could see the clutter and trash in her yard was because it was piled far above the six-foot fence, and was stacked up to the eight-foot height under the patio awning. It truly was an eyesore.

My husband, Tom, and I bought our unit two years ago because we wanted to own something, and it was a fixer-upper selling cheap. But we regretted our decision almost as soon as we moved in. It was our first experience dealing with a homeowners association, and true to the gossip that we had heard, the HOA board members were mostly investors who didn’t live onsite and they were crooked to the core. They got tips on which owners were behind on their mortgages, and they would bombard them with citations for violating the ‘house rules’. Pretty soon, the owners owed so much money to the HOA that the board put liens on the property. And eventually, some investor on the board would make a lowball offer to the beleaguered homeowner and take possession of the unit for pennies on the dollar. It was very sad, and our development had become a haven for low income renters as absentee owners bought cheap units just to rent them out. Tom and I started to look into putting our unit on the market.

Joanna lived alone as far as I could tell. She was not only eccentric because of her backyard piled high with junk, she walked her dogs, Tinkerbell and Taffy, in a baby carriage.

===

“Hey, Joanna. Do you come here often?” I leaned in and spoke softly since we were in the neighborhood library.

“No”, she shook her head and I could see her eyes glistening over with tears.

‘Let’s go outside” I said. We gathered up our books and belongings and went out to the parking lot. It was a sunny afternoon so we sat under a tree on the grass.

Joanna poured her heart out to me. I don’t think she had ever told anyone everything that flowed from the deep recesses of her memory that day.

She was the youngest of 4 kids, and she was 10 years younger than the sister born before her. Joanna had just turned 57. She admitted that her parents had babied her, and she had never moved out of the family home. Her father died when she was 22, and from the moment when she had found him dead in bed after he said he was going down for a nap on a Saturday afternoon in June, her life changed.

That Saturday afternoon 35 summers ago changed everything. She told herself that her mother needed her.

===

Her mother had been dead for seven years by now. Joanna had never married. None of the men she dated had ever made her feel more loved or needed than her mother did.

Before she knew it, Joanna was in her mid-40’s and bouncing from job to job. Her mother had breast cancer and Joanna nursed her through a mastectomy and a painful recovery. They were living in the ‘family home” full of boxed up memories blocking doorways and shoved into closets. Neither Joanna nor her mother had the heart or energy to clear out stuff over the years. Her older brother and sisters didn’t come to the house anymore. They told Joanna that she and their mother had become hoarders, but Joanna didn’t see it that way. It wasn’t like they had old pizza boxes laying around in the livingroom. But let’s just say that there were no empty rooms in the house, and they kept most of their curtains closed because there were boxes stacked up blocking the light.

===

Joanna talked about her mother dying a painful death in the upstairs bedroom with only Joanna by her side. She could have put her mother in hospice, but chose to keep her at home. Her brother and sisters called on the phone and spoke to their mother, but hadn’t seen her in a couple years by the time she passed away.

Her mother had promised her that she was leaving her money, and that the house would be hers. Her mother said that she was leaving nothing to Joanna’s siblings, and Joanna dreaded that. She also knew that with the morphine drip, she couldn’t always trust what her mother was telling her.

After not seeing her siblings for years, they all showed up and were sitting together in the lawyer’s office for the reading of their mother’s will. Joanna felt three pairs of eyes staring at her when the lawyer read aloud “and the sole ownership of the home at 1645 Anderson Drive and its entire contents are bequeathed to Joanna Wellington”. Joanna said that the next six months were filled with ugly calls from her siblings. Joanna knew that she no longer belonged in the house without her mother. And so she sold the house….

The house sold within a week of being on the market. Joanna didn’t think it was going to sell that fast, but she netted enough to buy a townhouse for cash without a mortgage. And that’s how she ended up buying a unit in our townhouse development. She had searched whatever paperwork she could find, and checked with the bank about whether her mother had a safety deposit box, but they said she didn’t. So Joanna guessed that her mother never had any money to leave her, as she had promised through her morphine haze. But Joanna was completely happy with her corner-unit townhouse without any mortgage owing.

For five years, her backyard had been the home to rotting boxes of who-knew-what? Her neighbors had started complaining that rats were running from her patio to their backyard. And once the HOA started checking out her unit’s ownership, they discovered something very interesting. Joanna had no mortgage. The investors on the board wanted her unit, and they wanted it bad. Joanna’s days there were numbered. Her first citation for a “cluttered backyard eyesore” came in the mail with 30 days to remedy the situation or she would have to pay a penalty of $100 per day. If she were issued a second citation for something (like rodent infestation in her backyard), they could increase the penalty to $250 a day. Joanna knew she was in danger of losing her unit within months, maybe weeks.

Joanna begged me for help.

“If you take everything out of my backyard, you can have whatever is there. I don’t want any of it. I know there’s some good stuff out there. You could sell it. I know you could. Whatever you find, and whatever you make off it, is yours to keep. I promise.”

A big tear slid slowly down Joanna’s left cheek. “It’s not garbage. There’s some good stuff. I swear.”

“I don’t know. I’ve gotta talk to my husband.” I was pissed off that I had let myself be dragged into this drama.

Tom’s plan was to rent a storage unit, rent a moving truck, and haul it all away to storage giving ourselves 30 days to get rid of it all. At the most, he figured we could be out $500 or so if we found nothing to sell. But I could see that he was up for the challenge.

So I went to see Joanna and let her know that on the next Saturday, Tom and I and two friends would empty out her backyard. Tom wanted me to get her to sign an agreement that we could keep anything we find, but I trusted Joanna. If we lost $500 trying to help her save her townhouse, I was cool with that.

And then Joanna let me in on her big secret.

“When you’re hauling stuff away and going through it in storage, there’s only two things I really want. Nothing else. I promise.”

“What?”

“Can you look for my mom?”

Stunned silence on my end. “What do you mean”

“Her urn. We cremated her and she’s in an urn. I don’t know where the urn is. It could be inside my house, but it could also be out here.”

“Oh my God. What’s the other thing you want to find?”

“A little black book. It was her diary that she wrote in for years while she was going through her cancer treatments. I need to find that black book. My mother told me once that she had left me money, but I never could find where she left it. I’m hoping maybe she wrote down where she kept her money in that little black book”.

I had 30 days to clear out the storage unit that was now stacked full of ‘stuff’ to a height of eight feet, or we would have to pay another month’s rent and we didn’t want to do that.

The more I dug through Joanna’s mother’s possessions, the fonder I grew of her mother. And of Joanna for dedicating her life to the woman who had given birth to her. Most of the good stuff we found were vintage and retro items from the 50’s and 60’s.

And then I saw it. The urn. It was wrapped in an old terry bath towel. I bent over and gently lifted it out of the box. It had a name engraved on the side. This was Joanna’s mother, Helen Wellington …and in another fold of the same bath towel was the little black book. I opened the book up and it was still intact with sturdy covers and unripped pages. In delicate handwriting, the diary started with the words “I went to the doctor today…”

I reached into one deep cardboard box and pulled out a short lamp, the type that was probably from a bedside table in one of the bedrooms in the family home. I was proud of myself for guessing correctly, as there was another identical lamp still in the box. When I turned one of the lamps over, I couldn’t believe it. It was stuffed full of MONEY. Both bedside lamps had been stuffed with money. I pulled some bills out of one lamp and they were all $100 bills. The lamps held a small fortune.

When I gave her the little black book, Joanna softly flipped through the pages looking at her mother’s delicate handwriting. “I’ll save this to read another time.” She turned to the last page that her mother had written on just a few days before she died. “Joanna, you have turned off these bedside lamps for me on thousands of nights. I never got to thank you for leaving them on until I fell asleep. You never left me in the dark over many years. When I am gone, the bedside lamps have at least $20,000 in them in $100 bills. Didn’t you ever wonder what I did with the two one-hundred dollar bills I asked you to get for me when my social security check hit the bank every month? The lamps hold over eight years of saving that $200 a month. You gave up your life for me. It’s the least I can do for you. I love you, Mom.”

Joanna and I counted out the bills, and she gave me half of the money. Exactly $10,000. I didn’t want to accept it, but she insisted. ‘You didn’t have to tell me about the money at all. Even if I had read about the bedside lamps, you could have told me you never found them. I’ll never forget what you have done for me.”

I went home and shared the story with Tom. He gave me a big hug and told me how proud he was of me for my honesty and kindness toward Joanna.