Seeds of Disquiet: One Deaf Woman’s Experience

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---26·Fred and I were very attached to our house on Washington Street. We had been absorbed in its renovation for more than three years. Everywhere we looked, we could see something we'd sweated to fix. Our neighborhood was terrific; parties with our neighbors were frequent and fun. Each summer we got permission to close our street for one night and hold a huge block party. In 1986, our work on the house was nearing completion, and we opened it to hundreds of visitors for a Christmas Tour to raise funds for Preservation of Historic Winchester. But our beautiful house ate money that wasn't in abundance in Fred's new career. We knew we could postpone some maintenance projects, but we couldn't bear to think about letting the house fall into disrepair. Fred had taken a position with a company that sold both modular and log homes. He was excited about the potential of modular home building. After lots of discussion, we decided to sell our house and erect a modular in a new development to show some of the possibilities. We planned to order the shell and put in most of the finishing touches. The excitement of working on something new helped mitigate our unhappiness over moving from Washington Street. 164 Seeds of Disquiet We'd renovated one house and restored another, but Fred and I had never had a glimpse of the kind of hell involved in building a house from the ground up. We bought the property and erected the modular shell without much incident. But it took a long time for the promised and badly needed water and utility lines to go in, slowing progress on the house to a crawl. We bought a generator so that we could run power tools, but without water we had to bring paint brushes home for cleaning and take jugs over to wash up spills. The house on Washington Street was under contract, and we had to move out of it before the new one was ready. Our friends Rosemary Green and Ron Heath had recently married; they became qualified for sainthood when they gave us the use of their basement room. We spent a horrendous six weeks living there with four dogs and a bird, sleeping on an air mattress and eating from a microwave oven. Fred and I worked on the new house with every minute we could spare from our paying jobs. The road leading to it was slow to be paved because the road contractor was also waiting for the water and utility lines to be laid. When we tried to get to the house to work, we were alternately choked with dust or bogged down in mud after it rained. All of us were miserable. The dogs were confused by the change in their habitat and had to be watched constantly. Several times they ran off and miraculously found their way back to our old home. Work on the new house brought another great crisis in our marriage. We seemed to go through one disaster after another. Some of the plumbing had been improperly installed and entire wall sections had to be ripped out. While we were moving our possessions to the new house, a section of shelving in our walk-in closet collapsed. As luck would have it, two full cans of paint were on those shelves to get them out of the way of the carpet installers. When the shelves collapsed, the paint cans fell, burst open, and instantly destroyed much of my wardrobe. 165 Seeds of Disquiet With so many things going wrong, Fred and I started to take our frustrations out on each other. I felt as if everything in my life was out of control, and there was nothing I could do about it. There was, however, one thing I could do, and I did it expeditiously. I changed my hair color. But I found that blondes do not have more fun. In the middle of this summer of our discontent, Toby's health began to fail. She was thirteen years old and had served as my ears with the utmost loyalty and distinction. The veterinarian told me that little could be done because her body was simply shutting down from old age. With the rest of my life in chaos, I couldn't bear the thought of losing Toby. I nursed her around...