The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

A lot of us shut-ins during this latest spike in the coronavirus are turning our attentions to the cages we’ve found ourselves locked down in these past months. Gutters need cleaning, windows need it too, closets need organizing, repairs need to be made, roof needs replacing, hell, maybe a complete kitchen remodel is in order. What else you gonna do for a year or more cooped up in the old shack?

If they had the money, they’d build an entirely new house, one with a separate entrance for the kids who have been learning now ‘virtually’, meaning, I think, they’ll be about a grade behind when sequestering ends. The grown kids are back too and a mother-in-law unit in the backyard would make everyone a little less irritable. The family that stays further apart is a bit more likely to stay together.

These are tough times on the cramped tail end of the island. No place to go, nobody to visit, only ‘essential’ services still open for business. We can take a drive to the grocery or hardware store, wear our funny face masks, but that’s about it. No grabbing a beer at the saloon, no sharing a lunch with a friend, no movie nights out, no strolling the mall, none of those flimsy trappings of a vanishing civilization. All that’s left is a desperate attempt to Martha Stewart the trailer. Mail order new curtains, fix the rotten tread at the bottom of the porch stair, grab some rocks off the beach and make a rockery for the flower garden they’ll plant next spring. Spring, you better believe, seems a million miles away right now, somewhere the other side of Venus.

Little Jimmy, half crazed from listening to his wife’s daytime TV soap operas and game shows and touchy-feely roundtable gossip, blasted the wall out in the living room and built a shop off the house where he could shut the door and escape and work on his model airplanes addiction. His mizzus was none too pleased at having a hole punched in her living room wall for her hubbie’s mancave. Ruined the feng shui, she kept muttering, and the whine of power tools and dremels and small gas engines didn’t add much to the contemplative atmosphere of her TV room cocoon either, she told him.

Jimmy didn’t help his cause much by dragging out the construction for months. Once he got it framed, roofed and insulated, his pace slowed glacially, a little molding here and there, caulking a window, lay some tile, no rush, that’s for sure. The door might never have gotten installed if Natalie hadn’t melted down in the middle of her favorite game show watching her hero dragging tool boxes around the shop for half an hour, scraping the floor, driving her nuts.

Next day Jimbo had a door on, you better believe it. With a lock. That he used. Once the beer fridge was plugged in, Jimmy breathed a deep sigh. Paradise, he said. Out loud. For awhile, at least, paradise, no pandemic. Natalie, you might have guessed, might not agree….

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