A Life To Learn: March 2015

Mar 30, 2015

The Burglaries

While living there we also had some bad things that happened. I simply cannot believe that no one, especially my husband, would believe anything that I have seen, heard and experienced while living in that house. Looking back it is beyond me to understand some of those things.

The Burglary

Yes, we were burglarized three times while we lived in that house. It happened once each year. Each time it was about a week or two after Christmas. Each time I had seen a light, like from a cigarette lighter flash in the woods across the street from us. Each time I told my husband about it and each time he just told me that I was seeing things and there was nothing there. Each time I saw that within three days we were robbed. They call that casing the house. The guy was watching our coming and going.

The last year I was attending college. Isn’t funny how your body knows that something isn’t right. I was sitting in Biology and I kept watching the clock. I was not bored, but something didn’t seem right. As soon as class let out I went straight to the babysitters where my youngest daughter was and picked her up.

Well, when I got home something did not look right about my house. I got out of the car and walked up to the door. When I saw that the door knob had been sawed off, I got really scared. I did not know if to walk into the house or not for fear of the burglar being in there or not. I was very afraid that if I went into the house and he saw me that I would be shot or some other bad thing. I was shaking like a leaf in the wind. I looked around to see if I could find the door knob. I looked all over the porch, the walkway and the driveway and did not see it at all. At this time my husband was staying at his parent’s while he went to college.

I went out to the wooded area and found it laying on the ground. I walked back to the door and tried to look inside the curtains and did not see anyone there. That is some scary feeling or what!!

When I walked into the house the first thing that I noticed missing was the Kerosene Heater. Who the heck would steal that?! We used it almost solely for heat as we did not have a fireplace in that house. We had an electric furnace.

I walked upstairs to the bedrooms. I didn’t see anything stolen from the girl’s rooms. Their mattresses were tossed upside down though and the rooms were all messed up. Then I got to our bedroom. The sight of the room brought me to tears and the fear was just over the top for me at that moment. The mattress was upside down. The sheets were torn from the bed, the drawers were all on the floor and the bed and all the contents were strewn all over the room. My Jewelry box was completely empty.

I got back in my car and went up to the farmer’s house and asked if I could use their phone to call the police and I told them what had happened. They were very courteous and they even watched my daughter while I was trying to console myself enough to sound calm and collected. Geeeesh, how do you do that when your house has just been robbed, your husband isn’t around and your older daughter has not made it home yet. The police came out and did their investigation, but I could not sleep in the house that night. I just could not. So we spent the night over at my neighbor’s. That was a surreal experience as well.

That was not the end of it though. When we called the Nationwide Insurance Company to make a claim you would not believe their service. It sucked big time. At that time Nationwide was NOT on our side. I made a list of all the things that were broken or stolen like they asked me too. Some of the things that were stolen were given to me as a wedding gift. One such item was a real pearl necklace that my in-laws gave me for a wedding present some ten years prior. Because I did not have a receipt insurance did not cover it. Oh it gets better! The also denied the claim because they said the house was not finished. It only needed to be painted!!!! If that is supposed to deter a burglary………good grief! Then they dropped our insurance. I never did get anything back.

From that moment on I did not put much into material possessions. They are just that…material. I like it simple. Sometimes, not very often, I will want more than is what is needed, but that isn’t very often.

All this could have been prevented IF my husband believed me. That wasn’t the only thing that he didn’t believe that could have been prevented…….but that is another story.

I researched and wrote this article. Please do not copy and paste any part of this article, picture included for your own use. I will find you and report you for stealing. It is my right to change any information therein at any time and/or change the location of my article.

Mar 27, 2015

Our Little Piece of Heaven

Back to the house that my first husband and I lived in in Thornburg, Virginia. Sorry that I do not have may photos of that time. I gave all the albums to my daughters when their dad and I divorced and his house caught on fire and they were all lost. I do have the pictures in my mind though.

While living in that house we had a small farmette or that is what I called it. It was really a one acre parcel of land that the farmer was partitioning off because he was getting older and could not take care of it all by himself. We used to visit him in the summer at the top of the road where his house was. He would give us some of the vegetables that he grew on his part of the land. His wife was very nice to us.

I called it a farmette because we did have animals on it and a big garden and all kinds of things like that. I loved it. It took us five years to get that garden started and to produce well and then we had to up and leave it. While we were there though, I grew corn, broccoli and lots of other things in my 40 x 80 foot garden. Why it was so hard to grow anything and get it going good was because the ground that we lived on was clay and our back yard was on a slope. My husband would till it over with a shovel. You could walk out there after it had rained and literally get your shoe sucked right off of your foot. It happened that way to all of us at one time or another.

Our Farmette

On our farmette we had a Goat, Chickens, ducks, rabbits, two dogs, four cats and a hamster. Yes, life was busy then and my two daughters would help out, most of the time. They did let some of the rabbits die though. I wish that I could have helped them but by the time that I found that my two daughters were lying about feeding them and giving them water, they were so bad off that there was nothing left for me to do. I was so heartbroken. They had to learn though even if it was not the way that I had envisioned them too. So I ended up taking care of all the animals. We survived out there and I loved my farmette. We had fresh eggs every day of the week, we had goats milk until Claire got mastitis a few times. That was no worry though as my husband worked for a computer engineer who had his business from home and he was a farmer too. He had a couple of cows and he taught me how to milk them when I worked there a few months. He was really very nice. He let us pick corn and put as much as we wanted into our very own freezer. We had fresh cow’s milk for the girls and since it was fresh milk, I had to pasturize it myself and I also got the cream from it and I made butter. I tried to make cheese, but I was not that good at it. Fresh butter and cream was the bomb then. Too bad that was only in a short period of our lives and we never did get back to that. We had it made there with all the fresh foods. It was an amazing part of my life that I will never forget and sometime I pine for that kind of life again, but it isn’t ever going to happen. Too much has changed and we all moved forward.

Winter and Our Goats

The winters were rough there with feeding the chickens and the goats. Claire had two babies one year but one died. They did a necropsy of it and found that it was born without a stomach. The other one was a boy and he was like a pet. He would follow us all over the place and the girls named him Waggles because he always wagged his tail. He was the happiest goat that I ever saw. Mom swore we let him live in our house, but we never did that. Well, one year I went down to feed them and found Waggles on the ground. Claire was making all kinds of racket when I went in her pen. I found that he was shot. It must have been a very clean shot because there was no blood, just a hole in his back flank. He was already dead by the time that I got to him. See we lived on a very forested area on the back of that farmers land. Waggles looked like a deer and I surmise that some kids were out shooting and hit him because they thought he was a deer and ran off when they found that it wasn’t. That was so sad.

The Rooster

Oh the chickens! The rooster gave my daughter a run for it, up the hill no less! She was about 7 years old and she went down to feed the chickens and gather some eggs. Well, the rooster got out and wow you would not believe the talons they have. He flew at her with those talons in front of him all the way up the hill. That hill was kind of steep and was about 200 feet in distance from the back of the house. The strangest thing about that was, we found him dead in the pen the next morning. All we could think of was that there was a fox living nearby or maybe the stray dogs got a hold of him.

The Rabbits

Speaking of stray dogs…

The bunnies!!! We had some bunnies that we were going to use as meat, but that didn’t happen. I fell in love with them and they ended up having some congenital sinus problem and could not be used for meat. So they became pets. Well anyway, about the stray dogs. A few times we were woken up in the very early hours, say right around when it just was turning light out, to blood curdling screams. I would look out the window and the bunny cages were on the ground. No dogs in sight because they heard me scream Bunnies are loose! We all got shoes on and bathrobes and what-not and went out to catch baby bunnies in the woods. What a wake-up call! You bet after we got things all put back together and all the bunnies accounted for and in their cages we had a big breakfast. This usually happened during the summer months because as I recall we didn’t have to go to school or anything. We never got more bunnies after that and they all just passed on except for two. We took them to Florida with us when we moved along with a couple of cats and a dog.

The Muscovy Ducks

The Muscovy Ducks were given to us when someone was moving and they could not take them with them. They would talk to me every morning and most of the day if I was around. They were a pair, one male and one female. One came up missing a couple of months later and then the other one died, with a broken heart I suppose. They say they mate for life and I had no idea how old they were when they were given to us in the first place. We also could not take them to where we were moving to either.

Bird Of Prey and Free Lunch

I must tell you about Birds of Prey. They be the quickest thing on earth that I have seen….er not seen because they were that quick. I had some chickens that laid a few eggs and we let them hatch. They were following their mom all around the yard, when one disappeared. Good Golly Miss Molly we could not find it anywhere. Then a few minutes, like 2 minutes, another one disappeared and we did not see where that one went to either. Mind you the mother hen was not being picked off but she was wondering where the heck her chicks were going. In about 15 minutes time the 7 chicks were all gone….Nothing, Nada, Ziltch…nowhere to be found. We never did see what bird of prey took off with them, but they were a nice quick lunch for it.

Those were the good times, but as life goes there are some bad with the good and that would be for another story.

Mar 25, 2015

Memories With My Dad

My dad as I remember him was a hard working father. As far as I recollect about my childhood he was the best dad a girl could ever need or wants. He let my mom do all the disciplining. He was there for me all the times that I needed him. He was very athletic. He was on a softball team and he was also a great bowler and even became a secretary for a league that he was on for many years. My mom was on the same league and I remember so well all the times that we went with them. I forgot now what night that they bowled. Anyway we would have dinner and then we would all go in our blue Chevy (I think it was a Chevy) to the Bowling Alley. My sister and I would walk around the bowling alley and then most times we ended up going to sleep on the bench as sometimes the game would last longer and later. That was when we were younger.

That was when Dad was on a softball team. We were in our teens then. We used to go to the games with him to watch him play. He was very good at softball and it was fun to watch. I remember one year dad was putting in a carport on the side of our house. They invited all the players that were on Dad’s team over to help him lay the cement. Oh they had plenty of food and of course Beer. It was fun and they brought their kids over and we all played while the fathers helped put in the carport. I often wonder where those times have gone. Very rare do I see or hear neighbors actually helping neighbors. Most are the kind that stick to themselves. Well that is what I have experiencing after my kids went off to college. They are grown now and off on their own. They want little to do with me now. I assure you it was not that way when they were teens and we lived in a huge neighborhood in a Florida suburb. I loved living there.

Back to my dad and his softball games. One year my mom got so mad at him that she told him not to come home. We never saw mom and dad fight and we had no idea what the fight was about. So, he did not come home that day and that was the words that my mother ate then. Dad was playing is softball game and he was running to a base and he was going to slide into it but then changed his mind. Bad move on my dad’s part. Instead of coming home he was rushed to the hospital and my cousin , who lived next door, had to make the call to my mom. He broke one leg and sprained the other. His right leg was in a full cast and he was laid up in bed for six weeks. Mom never said that to him again. Plus she had to live with him and dote on him for six weeks after that. Be careful what you wish for…… My mom learned that right quick.

I was Daddy’s girl and I think mom had/has a problem with that. I could tell him anything and confide in him, but not so much my mom. She would always tell me what I should not do. I always did something wrong in her eyes. I do not know what it was and still is. A few years after that, my dad was playing softball, and he had a heart attack. It was the first one that he ever had and he was not even 40 years old yet. They rushed him the hospital and he was in surgery and put in ICU. So my sister and I went to the hospital to see him. Well that was the worst experience I had, but it was not the last one that I would have in my life. My sister left and I was there in the waiting room. I did go in and see my father and then came back out. Since I was the only one around, Mom started yelling at me. Now she has done it this way almost all the time. She will wait until no one else is around and then she proceeds to rip me to bits. That day she had me in the waiting room of the hospital, she blamed me for my dad having a heart attack. She told me that if I had not confided in him that none of this would have happened.

That tore me up as you can imagine. I can still remember that time as if it were a week ago. I was standing there in a huge waiting area and the nurse’s station was off to the left of me. My mom was standing right in front of me and yelling those words at me. I did not say anything back to her because she would backhand me. I had been backhanded and thrown up stairs and not believed my whole life while growing up. I cannot say that I did not deserve them. Ever wonder why you did some things that were totally stupid when you were a child? I used to stick my tongue out at her when she turned around. Man moms have 20/20 on the back of their heads and their ears, how sharp they are that they could hear a pin drop in Africa and we live in the USA. This time was the ultimate and I did not move or say a word. I could not believe what was happening was real. It was like I was not there but I was there stuck in my body. It was so surreal.

From then on I did not confide in my father, nor did I say anything about what was really going on in my life to them. Nothing can ever take that or those words from me. They are so ingrained in my being. Since then my father has had many heart attacks, stents put in and experimental procedures. His body finally gave up on May 27, 2014 when he died of a massive heart attack in the hospital. He had just come out of dialysis and he was getting that to see if his blood would clean out. After he come from there he started coughing and they thought it was pneumonia and they were going to admit him. Mom wasn’t there that day. He was gone by the time she got there. I was not blamed for that….Thank God.

I have a history of DVT’s and my oldest daughter and I have come to the conclusion that they are kind of hereditary. No one else believes that especially, not their father. My father’s mother had 7 heart attacks in a week while in the hospital before she died. So there is something to my daughter and my hypothesis. Dad also had vein problems in his legs for years prior to his last heart attack. They never found out what the problem was.

In the last few years he finally got internet and a computer. I would send him many pictures of my gardens and of the renovations that we were doing to the house that was given to us by them. When I called them I felt like I was under the microscope and never dared to tell them anything about my personal life. I was afraid what Mom was going to say or do to me. I thought that mom really was the one who gave this cabin to us but found out later, that I assume now, that it was dad who really did….and that is another story to tell.

Mar 23, 2015

Jumping Forward To 1982

Summary:

This is going to be a book about my life that, I think, only my Dad knew about me. I am not sure because I have been lied too and lied about and my dad passed away on May 27, 2014. I will start it with a letter that I sent to him about 6 months before he died.

Introduction

This letter was explaining something that my mom keeps telling everyone. It is un-true. We lived in a house that we were building in Thornburg, Virginia. It was a very rough time for us financially and for me as I nearly raised my two daughters all by myself. My husband (now ex) was going to college part-time and was staying with his mom and dad most of the time. That is another story.

I did love the house though but it took forever to get it built as my husband was not around too much of the time. His brother would send me some help, but my mom got the idea that there was much more going on. We got into a fight about that one and I broker her pinky finger when she tried to hit me. She also thought that I pulled these guys in by myself and she was worried what others would say. I really didn’t care what they said as long as my children had a decent and clean place to live. Anyway that will come in another chapter in my book here. For now this is the last letter that I wrote my dad.

Mom thought that we did not have any money so she bought some groceries and some toys for the girls. They were like 4 and 6 years old. Angie was born low birth weight and had some sort of thing going on when she was born so the Doctors stressed that we give her no sugar. I did that and tried hard to keep it that way. Mom, however, bought all sugary stuff for the girls. I did get upset about that. She has and is also telling others that I am unappreciative and that if she had known that my husband made $1500.00 per month that she would have never helped us like that. So here is the letter to my dad that explains the truth. I do not think that he ever showed it to my mother.

The Letter To My Dad

About that $1500.00 mom keeps telling everyone about that is what James was making per month. She does not have that story correct. I am telling you the truth about that story right now.

James only made $1100.00 per month, Dad, not $1500.00. That $1500.00 was the amount that vanished from the checkbook one month and then the bank foreclosed on the house. I thanked GOD that mom and you helped me and the kids out when she bought that stuff to us!!! You and Mom will never know how much I loved that help. James was having an affair and I think that is what happened with that 1500.00 because me or the kids never saw that money! EVER!!!.

James was supposed to be getting a transfer to Florida with AT&T, but and it is a big BUT....they paid for our moving and then when we got down there....he did not have a job at all. They lied to him, big time. Dad ....both he and I had temp jobs picking up trash from construction sites for at least 6 weeks until he got a job. Then we finally get on our feet and then he quits that job and has another and they fire him and then he gets another and they ship him to Georgia and he came home every other weekend. He had an affair there......end of story........the rest is history.

So, Thank you guys for All THE HELP THAT YOU HAVE GIVEN ME.

Debbie

On one snowy day, and it was very snowy, my husband was supposed to have been home like 2 hours ago. I thought that it was just the snow and his drive to work and back from work is 1½ hours each way. So, I am waiting for him to get home and a bit worried too because I thought that he might have had an accident or been behind one. The traffic on the interstate was always horrendous and backed up. That was furthest from the truth. My mom calls me and asks me if my husband was home yet. I told her no and asked why. I was shocked at what she told me right after that. She said that she and dad stopped off to get a pizza at the pizza restaurant and they are looking at my husband having dinner with another woman. They even told me her name.

I told my husband’s mother (who was also having an affair with someone that lived with them) and she told me she wouldn’t get involved in that. My mom and dad never said anything to my husband about that either. So, I had no back up for anything. I do remember asking him about why it took so long to get home that day and he did make the excuse that the roads were rough.

This was only the beginning. It gets better (or worse) as they say.

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