Carol thinks I could have died from that pneumonia, had it been viral. At the time she said, you look terrible. I didn’t pay much attention, but one day I looked in the mirror, and I went out and asked her—pointing to my face—is this what you mean when you say I look terrible. Yes, she said.
I had thought that when a person got old and grey that the grey applied to hair color. Not so. One can also get old and grey in the face. I didn’t know that till the pneumonia. The color of my face was beyond white; it had gone over into slate grey. Now if my face isn’t positively ruddy, I think I look grey.
Grey is the color of sick. I saw this man about my age on campus. I think he was down and out and had probably come unto campus from the bus stop to use the restrooms. He had grey hair, a grey beard, his jacked zipped up to his neck, and he was grey. He was the color of sick.
I was getting back to my sort of normal color around the time the Delridge place went into escrow. The buyer was a Native American; she had grown up in wretched poverty and never owned her own home. It was a big step and naturally she hesitated, but she had money having become involved in some capacity with the local Indian run casino.
Apparently, she had, according to Suzi, felt spiritually drawn to Delridge. Maybe it was the privacy and the brush all around. She seems to have liked that it had been made out of the very earth upon which it stood. She came up to the property a couple of times at night to check out the spiritual vibes in the moonlight.
We got through escrow somehow. I made a mistake and wrote on some official document that the place had mold somewhere. That’s what I had been told after they did the termite inspection. They charged a pretty penny for that inspection; how many termites can there be in a house made out of mud? But they had mentioned mold in their report, and so I checked yes next to: does the place have mold question.
That scared the buyer apparently. But Suzi managed to straighten it out. I don’t know how she did but she did. Also we had to get the propane gas turned back on, and there was some sort of 250 dollar problem with the septic tank.
My sister in law, Teresa, Dave’s wife, thinks maybe selling the house helped to cause me some stress that could have led to or helped along the pneumonia. Maybe so. I had never sold a house before and didn’t know anything about how to do it, and I was doing it long distance. And I have to say, it seemed, that when I wasn’t thinking about something else, and was just getting a little relaxed that damn house and trying to get it sold would pop into my head. I couldn’t wait for it to be over.
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The picture shows the living room of Delridge.
