NEW GROUND... with some shocks (Part 99a)

Arriving at my parents driveway I was greeted by my mother walking down the path. She immediately asked where Elle and the kids were. When I told her that they were still home she asked why. It was if she fully expected them to be there. Disappointed, she immediately pushed for me to bring them the next day, Sunday, saying that Summer was almost over and that the kids had only visited her (and the beach) once. I told her I’d “work on it” knowing that it would be a sore spot with Elle’s mother if we did.

My father was out front (explanation: houses built on the water were placed so that the front of the house faced the water and not the road or street) working on the windows. Our house was very unique in the window treatment for the front. There were six large double hung windows that had thirty two individual panes of glass in each. With a southerly exposure they were baked by the sun continuously and the putty that held them in had dried out. The house was 30 years old and the windows needed to be re-glazed, badly. When I got there I could see that he’d scraped the dried putty from about 2/3 of two of the six. If it rained, water could seep in behind the panes and ruin the finish of the interior part of the window. My job was to put new putty in those windows.

It’s a pretty mindless task and, with the Summer sun beating down on me as well as the windows, I found my mind wandering. Jeanette, the Summer neighbor came out to the beach with her son shortly after noon and seeing her perked up my mind. Wearing her tight short shorts my thoughts went immediately to what was underneath them. I was too far away to even see a VPL but it didn’t stop my thought process. Her sister, Karen, appeared and came over to say hello. I asked where all the men were and she laughed saying that they’d caught “fishing fever”. Her father, Big Al, had rented a boat and they’d gone off to catch ”big one”. But then she got serious and asked if I could do her a favor. She’d opened all the windows early in the morning but with the afternoon southerly starting she wanted to close some of them and one was stuck. I was ready for a break and followed her over to her rental cottage.

Built ten years prior to our house as a Summer cottage, it was in need of a LOT of TLC. The problem was the upper half of a bedroom double hung window. Karen had lowered it and couldn’t get it all the way back up. Due to the age and condition of the window I was reluctant to push too hard on the upper part of the sash for fear of either breaking it or putting my hand(s) through the glass. That left me to go outside to see if I could get enough purchase on it to get it to move. However, once outside the window I was greeted by a bit of a dilemma... a thicket of rambling roses.

Someone must have gotten a good buy on them because I can think of five houses who had them, including my parents. Most were right around the houses and in the case of the window I was looking at the bush hadn’t been trimmed in years and was flush against the house. The only way I could get to the window was to try and get in as close to the house as possible and then slide along it. Trying my best not to get scratched I made slow progress constantly looking down at the bush. I had to go about eight feet but when almost there I saw something white in the bush. I reached down and got my first scratches. I almost pulled back but having already paid the price kept on going until I reached it. Pulling it out was slow going but it was worth it as it turned out to be a pair of Lollipop bikini panties. I knew they had to belong to Jeanette so stuffed them into my pocket and continued on to the window. A couple of good “hits” with the heel of my hands freed it and I was a “hero”. Karen wanted to do something for me as thanks but I already had my "thanks" stuffed away in my pocket.

Back out from being engulfed by the roses I stood there looking around wondering just how the panties could’ve ended up in the thicket. The wash line was around the corner from where I was. I couldn’t imagine them having been blown from there. There was an empty lot right next door with a few scrub oak trees and as I looked at it I could see that some weeds had been trampled down around them. On one there was a strand of rope hanging down and got the idea that they had made up a separate wash line. My best guess was that panties may have been hung on it and one got blown into the roses. It didn’t really matter as I now had the panties.

Having those panties in my pocket got my mind really going as I went back to working with the putty. I got to thinking about Norma, her sister Bobbi and their aunt, Ali. My mother brought out some lemonade to give me a break and I sat down and chatted with her. I knew that Norma had become friendly with Jeanette and would bring her son down to play with Jeanette’s son. I’d heard my other mention that Norma’s mother, Peggy, would occasionally walk down the beach to check up on them and in so doing had reestablished her friendship with my mother. So I asked my mother if she’d recently seen anything of the family. She said that she hadn’t and then, for some reason, I asked if she’d heard anything about the suicide of her brother. There was nothing but silence.

As I’ve written in a few prior posts, my mother wasn’t a “gossip monger”. It wasn’t that she wasn’t interested because, like most of us, she was. But, in her case, she would keep what she heard to herself unless put into a situation that she felt comfortable with to discuss it. Her silence provoked me to pursue the subject further. She really was hesitant and it would take me a whole post to go through the whole process so I’ll condense it as best I can. I’ll preface it by saying that I was curious because this suicide was the second one in our little area and they were the only two that I actually had known was aware of.

To be continued...