Change you Can't Believe In

Traverse City, Michigan
“Country Music, 24/7”
Cinco de Mayo Swan Dive*
It is the Fifth of May in northern Michigan – sunny, Margaritas on the beach Cinco de Mayo in San Diego terms – and I am driving to work in a blizzard. Even with the heat blasting in the Escort, I am freezing, despite the fact that I am wearing my snow-bunny-pink and black ski jacket I bought back in California for frolicking on the sunny slopes of Steamboat Springs, Colorado.
That was two moves ago.
Now I am here, white knuckling it as the car slides and slopes and thrashes about on the muddy muck that was once the dirt road we live on. The holes in the road are like potholes the car skids into and I am doing everything they warned you NEVER to do in Catholic school: dreaming of adultery with a man far, far away from here (any man); murdering my spouse; and curse-praying I don’t get stuck in one of these friggin’ mud holes as each of my neighbors have before me.
In this land of camouflage coats and rusty pick-up trucks I look like a freak with this pink coat on, driving a gold Escort. But all I want to do is make it to work alive. I have seen the neighbors in knee-deep muck trudging home for a towline and another family member who, of course, also has a pickup truck to pull their mud-splattered vehicle out of the quicksand our home has become.
How in Hell did I get here???

***

“Have I got the house for you!”
He said, and arced the car down a bumpy dirt road alongside a river.
David’s big brother Kevin – and I mean BIG and TALL - is a realtor in Traverse City, so when we finally got there I spent three nauseating hours in the backseat of his bouncy old Buick, feeding Woody luncheon meat out of the wrapper, while Kevin took us to all the properties he wanted to unload.
The first thing I saw was the homemade “STOP” sign in front of a rusty mobile home. “That’s not it, is it?” I asked nervously.
“Nah!” said Kevin. He yanked the car between two rows of Christmas trees and said, “This is it.”
The dog burped.
The driveway was long and covered with dirt. Oh, it was dirt.
I am from Long Island. I had never seen a dirt driveway before.
“Oh,” I said, when I saw the water-stained wooden shoebox at the end of the driveway.
“Oo, look. Lil’ Hell house on the Prairie,” I say.
“It has a workshop!” Kevin beamed. He pointed to the Little Tiny Hell house on the Prairie, at the end of the dirt, I mean driveway.
“That’s a shed,” I said. I know this because the neighbors next door had one when I was growing up. Rabid raccoons raised their devil babies in there.
David gave me a dirty look and said to Kevin, “How much?”
“For you, fifty grand,” Kevin said.
“We’ll take it,” David said.
Woody began to whimper.
“But – aren’t we going to see the inside?” I asked.
“C’mon,” Kevin said, jangling keys.

**
A box.
An unheated box with a woodstove: that’s what we walked into.
I had never seen a real woodstove before, unless you count Old Bethpage Village, a recreated colonial village on Long Island. We went there for field trips in grammar school, and I thought it was “cool” then. At seven I also thought my Dad was the tallest man in the world, and making brownies from a mix was “hard.”
“It’s…pretty,” I said.
“It’s our heat.” David said.
“But… isn’t there a thermostat?” I asked.
“Why, when there’s no heater?” he asked back.
WHAT.
“But-“
“Deal!” David said, and slapped Big Bro on the broad shoulder.
“ I’ll draw up the papers tonight,” Kevin said, and slapped him back. “You won’t regret it,” he said.
Really.
Can I hold you to it? Like, at gunpoint?