The court, having spent some weeks impressing upon me the importance of dates, finally supplied one upon which everyone had reason to agree. The landlord wanted the house. I could no longer keep it. The remaining dispute concerned what, precisely, would follow me out of the door.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A house may be surrendered in an afternoon. The claims arising from its surrender can enjoy a much longer life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was unpaid rent, certainly, but also the possibility of charges for cleaning, repairs, removal of what I could not carry away, legal fees, and whatever else might be discovered once I was too far away to dispute it conveniently. I had already accepted that I would lose most of the contents. I was unwilling to spend the next several years receiving invoices for the privilege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I negotiated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was an exercise in which poverty conferred no particular advantage, but neither did it deprive me of the ability to understand what the other side wanted. They wanted possession without the expense and uncertainty of continuing the case. I wanted an end to it. The court had obligingly placed us in a room where those interests could be compared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The result cost me six thousand dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I appreciate that this is an unusual way to describe a bargain won by the person who wrote the check. The landlord received the house and the money. I received a deadline, a mutual release, and the extinguishing of any and all claims, in perpetuity, which might otherwise have followed me down the road. Once the agreement was performed, the case would be dismissed with prejudice. What remained in the house could be disposed of, and its disposal would not become another bill sent after me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Six thousand dollars was painful. An indefinite claim upon my future would have been worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I believed I had obtained the better bargain. They received what they had expected to recover. I bought something I had feared would prove considerably more expensive: an ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The ending was scheduled for five o\u2019clock on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By then the contract which had seemed, at first, to offer an escape from the financial arithmetic had acquired an appetite of its own. The company\u2019s difficulties were real. Access to its systems, responsibility for its records, and uncertainty about who still held authority over either could not be resolved by offering an opinion and sending an invoice. Each question opened onto another. The man who had engaged me was away at Mount Everest, and I was increasingly present where decisions had to be made.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I knew how this happened. One takes responsibility for a small piece of a problem, discovers that the next piece is attached to it, and soon finds oneself holding a considerable portion of the machinery while someone asks whether one might just keep it running for another week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was work to do. I was good at it. I also had a house to empty, a dog to care for, and a trailer whose completion had never been included among the company\u2019s objectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On Wednesday, the house took precedence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had imagined the final departure often enough to discover that imagination is a poor instrument for estimating how long it takes to leave. In its more flattering versions, I closed boxes, inspected rooms, took a last look around, and walked out with the composed sorrow of a woman who had made every decision available to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were no composed decisions left. There were things I could carry and things I could not, and a clock which had no interest in the distinction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Meridian was loaded past the point at which her interior could be called orderly. Bins had been put wherever they could be put. The route to the bed, the desk, and the toilet had nearly disappeared beneath them. I had built a home with careful attention to the space required for my body to move through it, then, in the final hours, filled that space with the things I had been unable to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yang\u2019s food was aboard. Yang was coming with me, already situated in his soft crate in the truck. Whatever else I might have failed to preserve, those two matters were settled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I photographed the keys and the lockbox. I sent the notice surrendering possession at 4:58, two minutes before the appointed hour. It is possible that, had I taken another ten minutes, I might have found something valuable still inside. It is certain that the deadline would have passed while I looked for it. A result that would have been devastatingly consequential, as it would have forfeited everything I had gained in negotiation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rain had been gathering around Sacramento all day, and the sky had finally broken open. I had no reservation, no campground awaiting us, and no desire to back a long trailer into the company\u2019s small lot beside the river after dark. The apartment was available, but Meridian could not simply be wished into a parking space there. For our first night, I meant to sleep in the home I had spent months constructing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This required finding somewhere amenable to this plan to place us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A parking lot which appears generous when entered in a car acquires an entirely different character behind a truck and twenty-four feet of trailer. Places which might have served earlier in the day were too late to arrange. Others were too far away. At one point I considered a Walmart, then contemplated the prospect of negotiating my presence there with management after the day I had just endured… and so continued driving.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trailer itself required attention before I could sleep in it. Her tires were low. Her aisle was impassable. I had to climb over the very possessions she had been built to accommodate. A bed five feet above the floor offers little comfort if one cannot reach it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, the road was finally beneath us, and for a moment, already traveling eastward, I contemplated just continuing on. The house was behind us, and what was one claim on us over another?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alas, the money was too attractive. But for a few hours, the road was enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then the operators of large trucks began flashing their lights at me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It took me a moment to understand what they were saying. Donkey\u2019s lights were working. Meridian\u2019s brake lights and signals worked. Her running lights, the small points of red and amber which make a trailer visible in the dark, did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I did not know when they had gone out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I pulled off the freeway, made what checks I could, and reseated the connector. Nothing changed. I could see Meridian behind me when I stopped. The people sharing the road could not be expected to do the same at speed, in the rain, from a distance. I put on the hazards and made for a place to stop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We reached the rest area at Dunnigan and parked among those big trucks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inside Meridian, I cleared enough space to get to the bed. The work was graceless, but the bed was there, and so was Yang. I drew the velvet curtains. Rain tapped softly upon the aluminum roof. My familiar brown noise and its faint running water filled the little room, and the trucks outside diminished to a distant condition of the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For one night, Meridian did exactly what I had asked of her. She took the rain, the noise, the exhaustion, and the uncertainty, and kept them outside her walls. I lay in the bed I had made, in the home I had built, with the old dog snoring beside me. For that night, we were safe, and we were comfortable. Far more comfortable than I had been in longer than I could remember.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We had left the house, and our prior life, behind us. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
By daylight, I could take Meridian back to Sacramento and put her in the company lot. Getting her into it was difficult enough without darkness and rain. There she remained, near the office where I was increasingly needed and the river which Yang found considerably more interesting than the company\u2019s affairs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I went to the apartment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It had a bed because I had insisted upon one. It had stairs which my body regarded as an unreasonable condition of occupancy. It had neither the furnishings nor the ordinary comforts which might have made those stairs worth climbing. Meridian, parked near my work, contained the life I had actually prepared. The apartment contained a place to lie down after I had exhausted myself getting to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The running lights remained out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I looked for someone who could repair them. The most promising trailer service was booked weeks ahead, a period which might as well have been a geological age when measured against my plans to leave. Other possibilities did not become an appointment. Each day the contract drew me further into the company\u2019s trouble, and each evening Meridian waited with the same small, decisive fault.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I could suspect a damaged wire. I could suspect the truck\u2019s trailer-light circuit or the connector. I could remember work done near the wiring buried behind Meridian\u2019s walls. Suspicion, however strongly felt, did not identify which part had failed. Her brake lights and turn signals still answered the truck. The lights by which she announced her presence after dark did not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If I could not find someone to put them right, I would have to trace the fault and, if necessary, run a new circuit myself. The prospect was less frightening than the time and physical work it would require. I had already engineered most of the electrical system beneath my bed. I was quite capable of understanding a marker light. Capability, unfortunately, does not confer additional hours upon the day or make a painful back willing to crawl beneath a trailer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The court case was ending. The house was gone. The contract was flourishing. Meridian had carried Yang and me through our first night, then taken up residence beside an office in the city we meant to leave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
California had gravity. I had expected that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had not expected it to find so small a place to attach and suck onto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The court, having spent some weeks impressing upon me the importance of dates, finally supplied one upon which everyone had reason to agree. The landlord wanted the house. I could no longer keep it. The remaining dispute concerned what, precisely, would follow me out of the door. A house may be surrendered in an afternoon. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milemarker.blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}