Carbon-Dale

There's an old joke on me, that if I were a (fill in the blank) I would be (fill in the blank)-Dale. Basketball player-- Airedale, wooddale, springdale etc. So, if I were an element I would be, you guessed it, Carbon-Dale. And so, here I am, in my element. And it really does seem to be so. It's not that I can't tell that I am here, its just hard to believe! Pinch me I must be dreaming. Ouch, no, that's not me pinching myself, its one of the innumerable flying, stinging biting insects that thrive in this sultry climate. With in my first 24 hours of living here my legs were covered with bites, and I have been lathering my legs with Bendryl lotion prior to liberal application of DEET. I have a new fondness for Backwoods Off.

After the movers had departed and we were alone in our new house, Ryder and I put on our gym shoes and socks and headed out in to the woods with Mirabel leading the charge. The woods behind our house and extending for 100s of acres beyond our property are dense with oak, hickory, sweet gum, dogwood-- all very tall and straight, reaching well over 75 feet by my estimation. We went as far as we could working our way around the fallen trees and soon found ourselves lost and disoriented. It took about 30 minutes bashing through the stinging nettles, wild roses, raspberries and fallen trees to catch sight of the house. We found the old fence lines that mark the property and navigated our way back to the house, our legs scratched and bitten. Fortunately we did not encounter poison ivy which is reported to be prevalent in these parts.

The terrible inland hurricane, now referred to as the derecho, causes huge damage to the woods and hundreds of these old tall trees were felled. The ground had been saturated by the very wet spring and when the straight line 100+ mph winds blew through here on May 8, the ground was not able to hold the roots and the trees toppled, one onto the other, literally like dominoes, and the line of fallen trees cut a narrow swath tens of miles long through the woods, bisecting Carbondale, causing millions of dollars of damage. Power was out for nearly a week and many homes suffered extensive damage. Our house was sparred any direct hits, though our immediate neighbors took a tree to the garage. One of our colleagues lost their rear deck to a fallen tree. The lovely path around Campus Lake is still impassable due to the carnage, if you could call it that. Huge oaks lay on their sides with only the limbs that blocked roads or knocked down power lines having been cut off and dragged out of the way. An inadvertent stimulus to the local economy, providing more work to laborers than has been available in these parts in years. The cleanup will go on for months, if not years. Until I go into the woods on Hales Acres with a chain saw, the fallen trees and tangle of broken limbs will remain. We will have enough firewood forever by the looks of it.

We left our empty Oak Park home at 2 PM on June 11th with Karen and Ryder in the Subaru with three cats and me driving the Mazda with two dogs. The cars were packed to the windows with all the stuff that didn't make it onto the moving van. Our caravan pulled into the drive way on Hunt Road at about 9 PM, in the gathering darkness. Our first delightful discovery was that we could pull both cars into the garage even with the Thule rack on top of Mister House. We closed the garage and opened the car doors and came into our new empty, clean house. Like a dream, only this time, this trip to Carbondale is the big move. We now live here. Really? Can it be true? Do we now really live in this fantastic house on this secluded beautiful wooded lot? Zowee.

We pitched out air mattresses and sleeping bags in the rose room and slept well until 7 the next morning when the movers called to say they were here but couldn't figure out how to get the truck to the house. The neighbors and the sellers both had expressed their doubts about a 54 foot tractor-trailer being able to make it to the house. When they had moved they had to shuttle between the house and the van parked in the Walmart lot. But our movers were determined and also talented and backed the moving truck over a half mile all the way down Hunt Road from old hiway 13. These guys were great. It took them all day, and half the next to unload the truck and move our vast possessions into the house-- and then move the stuff around to where we thought it should go. Then we went to SIU and they moved all the stuff into the lab. It only took a few hours to unload the lab, having a loading dock and elevators made short work of my 20 year collection of labware. The big New Brunswick environmental shaker was that last to come off the truck. So far only one causality was the nice Ikea floor lamp we bought to stage our OP house for showing (argggg) which was snapped in half. We did find one beer mug that was cracked when we unpacked the glasses, but who knows if it was that way before we packed it. Insurance will replace the lamp, but first we have to unpack the lab and the rest of our stuff to see if there is anything else that didn't make it. Considering that our stuff completely filled the van, all 31,000 pounds of it, one broken lamp is pretty insignificant.

We spent the better part of the time since we've lived here unpacking. The movers packed all our glassware and after we took it all out of the boxes we had a pile of paper up to the ceiling and a pile of flattened boxes 1/4 as high. Our new trash service is happy to haul all these recycleables away in stages. We rolled the paper and bundled the boxes and will feed them to the trash men over the next few weeks. The move gave us the opportunity to collect our various things into one collection of each. It is quite the collection of glasses we have. Some from my father's bar, some from Karen's mom, many from different purchases we've made through the years. Gads, we have enough glasses to equip a tavern! I suppose one of our near future purchases will be a dinning room set with table, hutch and buffet. This house has a formal dining room in addition to the kitchen dining area where the "distressed" old table I made over 30 years now resides. We were tempted to get a new dining room table to stage our house for sale, but our real estate agent convinced us that this old thing I built is tres chic, distressed is in. And this is the trusty and very firm surface this computer rests on while I type this. Glad to be inside on this Father's Day enjoying the A/C. Its well over 90 already and rather humid. This part of being in my element is questionable. I grew up in the dry Colorado air and living in the tropics is going to be the biggest adjustment to living here, as far as I can tell so far. We just love the pace of life of a college town in the summer, and sure don't miss the traffic and crush of people in far off Chicago. We all miss our friends but are so happy to be together, all us here in this paradise. As we took possession of the house, the night of our closing, our new neighbor, also the head of department at SIU, greeted us with "welcome to paradise." I am beginning to appreciate what he meant.