Harrowing Delight

VOCAL: pear tree challenge

Harrowing Delight

I had finally hit twenty-five years at my police job, which meant that I could retire with a pension. Since we met, my husband, Charlie, had been biding his time until I hit this milestone. As a bridge engineer, he had been forced to only take jobs within driving distance of our house on Long Island Sound in Connecticut. He hated his current project in the Bronx and now we could finally move anywhere in the country. So in mid-September when a firm in Virginia responded to his resumé, we packed up and moved.

With his new project on the Elizabeth River, we found a house only five miles away. It turns out that selling a small house in Connecticut can get you a pretty big house with a yard in Virginia. We found a sprawling three-bedroom ranch on an acre and a half of land. The north corner of the back yard came complete with two pear trees, an apple tree and, amazingly, a peanut butter fruit tree.

While neither one of us were huge fans of fruit, I decided to make the best of it and try to use the fruit. I called our realtor and asked her if she knew, or could find out, the types of fruits that were growing on the trees. I was told the peanut butter fruit tree was the the only type of that tree that existed. The pear trees were a Luscious and a Harrow Delight, and the apple was a Northern Spy.

So here I was: a retired big-city homicide detective baking pear crisps and making jams, while comparing paint swatches. It was fine, this was what we had talked about for at least five years. It was just different. Many people who had never been a cop couldn’t understand how we could ever miss working on a bloody, violent, murder scene, or being called to a D.O.A. that had gone unnoticed for three weeks in August. It wasn’t the nauseating circumstances that I missed, or the sadness that went with it, but more the camaraderie of working with my second family, and hopefully bringing closure to someone else’s family.

Even being retired, it was not easy trying to make this house feel like my own. I began by painting almost every room of the house by myself. I systematically painted one wall of each room each day so that I could continue to function in all the rooms and move furniture around accordingly. It felt good to be able to open the door and windows to vent the house and not worry about some creepy tweaker coming in, or having the smell of low tide waft through the place. Many people think that living in Connecticut automatically means that a person is rich, which is a huge fallacy. Charlie and I lived in a low-to-middle class neighborhood near a salt-water beach, peppered with tiny houses which once served as people’s vacation homes.

Our new yard was huge but since the rider lawnmower came with the house and we brought the rest of our yard tools with us when we moved, we thought we could handle the maintenance ourselves. Most of the work was what we were used to in Connecticut, but we found that keeping up with fallen fruit was a huge pain that neither of us wanted to deal with.

Within weeks I found that flies and worms were abundant in the areas under and around the trees. Some internet sites recommended burning the rotting fruit, but we didn’t feel comfortable with lighting a fire in an area with which we still were not that familiar. I had hoped that maybe some wild animals would take care of the problem for us, but no such luck.

To get really comfortable in the house, I felt like I should finish our bedroom first, and I did. I painted it a loud green called “Kiwi” with lighter trim around the door and windows. Then I splurged on new drapes and bedding and it looked more like home, but there was still so much more to do.

After about a month of living and working in the house, Charlie and I spent a quiet Saturday night making tacos, drinking beer, and watching old movies. Occasionally we talked about what we would do when Charlie was ready to retire. The fall foliage turned earlier in Virginia than it did in Connecticut and it was amazing. We made plans to take a long drive the next day, and get to know the neighborhood, and the state, better.

Full of Saturday night junk food and too tired to talk anymore, we went to bed. Charlie was out like a light immediately. A life-long poor sleeper, I finally fell asleep but then awoke to a sound. I didn’t know what it was, or if I had even really heard it or merely dreamt it. Charlie was still sound asleep. I slinked out of bed and listened. For twenty seconds I heard nothing, and then I heard scraping, some kind of scraping. And it was coming from inside the house.

I grabbed one of two shot guns that we still owned and Charlie woke up. When he began to speak, I shushed him, loudly, and whispered, “Someone’s in the house!”. “Are you sure?”, he answered back. I nodded, pointed downstairs and told him to stay behind me. He immediately grabbed his handgun and followed me down with his cell phone in his other hand. And then he heard it, too. We both stopped on the stairs and listened.

It was louder, whatever it was, and coming from the kitchen. I crept to the bottom of the stairs, listening to Charlie saying he would go first. I replied with another loud whisper of, “No, you won’t!”, and raised the shotgun to low-ready position. After seventeen years together, he knew better than to argue.

I swung the barrel of the gun around the kitchen doorway in front of us and that’s when I saw it: a huge black bear, tearing open the kitchen garbage to eat what was left of the tacos. I had never seen a bear in real life before and to my astonishment, he was as surprised as I was. I started to yell but it was unnecessary. He spun so fast he knocked over my painting supplies and two bar stools, and ran out the open back door. He was faster than I would have guessed and made it far into the dark back yard before I could even fire or give chase. I vaguely remember Charlie yelling for me to stop and stay where I was. In our newfound comfort and freedom, one of us had left the back door open.

While Charlie locked the door, I turned on the lights and actually sat on the floor, garbage everywhere and the shotgun across my lap, and I found myself laughing . While I did feel silly, I felt just a little bit like a cop again, and that house finally felt like it was really ours. It was a harrowing delight.