Bonnie's Apartment

When I was just a wee tyke, my parents decided to move from Salem into Marblehead with our family. Instead of selling the old house we were living in, My dad changed it into a 3 family apartment house, and since that fateful decision the house has become our burden. With a single nurse living on the first floor, a small family on the second, and an older woman on the third.

One way we judge the seasons is by the request of installation or removal of the single nurses' (Bonnie) air conditioners. In the Spring when she calls to tell us to install these units, we officially make it summer in our household. When she asks for them out, we take our boat out of the water, and it's fall.

Installing Bonnie's air conditioner is quite a process. My father and I get out of our car, and open up the door to the dank, musty basement where the air seems five times thicker than that of the surface air. We carry two heavy air conditioners up steep stairs through a doorway that it doesn't quite fit through. When we open up the door to Bonnie's apartment, we immediately have to close it, because every time we forget about the amount of felines trying to get out of the door. So after shooing away 7 to 8 cats, we get the air conditioners in the kitchen. The kitchen smells heavily of catfood, and instantaneously, our noses and eyes are itchy. But you see, the Kitchen is the best part of the house. It actually has a little bit of space around the cat scratchers. As I enter the living room, my fingers begin to tingle with the feeling that I'm being watched, and as I survey the room, I see thousands of small dolls. Perched on walls, and all over bookshelves. Carolers, to American Girls, to strange chinese porcelain face dolls. Every one of them is staring. There are actually so many dolls and knick knacks all around the rooms, that there are only small paths from the couch, to the bedroom and kitchen. Making access to the window nearly impossible. My father slowly squirms through the ranks of doll corps to the window while I guide him. Like a human twist on the milton-bradley game "Operation". Things are going well and we get the air conditioner installed. After my father does anything, he steps back to look at it. This is instinct, that he has been doing for years, to analyze if anything needs to be adjusted. When this instinct hits him, he forgets that he is surrounded by many breakables. I watch him in slow motion back into a set of cow sculptures in various corny poses. Before I can utter a word, they fall. My dad panics, and turns around to see what he hit. But in the process, hits over more breakables, and turns again to see what that was until a chain reaction occurs, and before 13 seconds pass, he has gone through a full day's worth of sales at The Christmas Tree Shop on route 1. Eventually I yell to him to just stop moving. We pick up the pieces of doll, and finagle them into positions that make them look normal, and take home the ones that are beyond repair.

We pray to God that Bonnie didn't notice.