Donna heard a knock at the door and frenzied shouting. “Are you home? Can we come in?”
Donna’s daughter-in-law Elaine was carrying her toddler under her arm. The little boy looked happy to see his grandma, but Elaine was red-faced and frantic.
“That chimney! We’ll get rabies! In our own home.”
Donna had never seen Elaine so worked up. She had no idea what Elaine was talking about, but she didn’t want to make it worse by asking. Donna helped the toddler take his coat off and took him in to the living room to the toy box. “Coffee’s on,” she called out over her shoulder as she left Elaine fuming in the porch.
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To Donna’s relief, her son Jeff, Elaine’s husband, came in soon after, with Donna’s husband Dale and Dale’s father Ed.
“It was like an episode of Wild Kingdom,” Ed said, humming the theme tune from the corny 1970s wildlife show.
“We didn’t have to use a tranquilizer gun,” Dale said. “That was the real thing.”
It took Donna the better part of a pot of coffee to get the story. A raccoon had crawled in through the chimney in the old house across the yard where Elaine and Jeff lived. Elaine had been playing with the baby in the living room when the raccoon leapt out, growled, and ran under the couch. Elaine had grabbed the baby and made a break for the door, running out to the yard to find Jeff so he and his father could get rid of the thing. Like Wild West heroes, they’d shown up with a gun and the dog.
“This is the last straw,” Elaine said. “We can’t live there anymore.”
When Jeff and Elaine had quit their city jobs to move to the farm last winter, Ed had bought himself a condo in town and they’d moved in to his farmhouse.
“We’ve been over this a million times,” Jeff said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Elaine wasn’t a complainer, but she’d never been crazy about the old farmhouse. It was drafty — even Ed would admit that — and Elaine had seen her share of mice, spiders, flies, frogs and even snakes in the house. “I’m just not sure it’s safe for the baby,” she told her husband.
Jeff didn’t disagree. He just didn’t see an easy solution. Building a new farmhouse would be so expensive. It would be tough to find good contractors who would come out to the farm — Hanson Acres was in the middle of the oilpatch, and labour was scarce.
They’d considered remodelling Jeff’s grandfather’s house. But the old house had never been well-built, and they soon realized that fixing it up to a standard that would keep them happy in the long run would cost at least as much as building a new house.
Then they’d looked at a farmhouse five miles down the road, when the neighbour sold his land. “But do we want to live over there on our own, when all the farm business will be going on in your parents’ yard?” Elaine had asked. “I know it’s not far, but we’d miss all the little things. Especially me. I’d be over there with the baby all day while you and your mom and dad make all the day-to-day farm decisions. If we’re going to do that, we might as well live in town.” Jeff understood. He wanted his wife to feel as much a part of the farm as he was.
A few of the neighbours had installed ready-to-move houses on their farmyards. These houses seemed well-built. But even that would mean tracking down contractors to build a basement, and, of course, finding a way to pay for the house.
The Hansons weren’t in financial trouble, but they didn’t have much spare cash. Spring rains in 2011 had kept them from seeding most of their 6,000 acres. To pay for a house, Jeff would have to take money out of the farm corporation. That would mean paying personal taxes, and finding a way to make things fair for his sister, who was still in university.
Jeff’s grandfather’s house was a nightmare, but it was in the right place, and it was free.
Elaine wanted to be reasonable. But this raccoon fiasco came on the heels of a visit to her younger sister’s new house in Saskatoon. While Elaine had taken agriculture in university, her younger sister had become a nurse. Now Jenny was working at the University Hospital, and she and her boyfriend had just bought a new house on the south end, in Stonebridge.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Elaine had said to Jeff the day they got home from Saskatoon. They were shivering under a blanket, watching TV in the living room while a breeze blew in through the chimney. “We went to school. We work hard. But we’re living like peasants and Jenny has a double oven and a walk-in closet.”
“We have each other. And the wide-open spaces,” Jeff answered.
Elaine had a sense of humour. She coped with the drafts and the cracked ceilings. But she’d reached her limit with this raccoon.
“Jeff,” Elaine said. “We have to do something.”
“You could make the kid a Davy Crockett hat,” Ed said.
“Grandpa,” Jeff warned.
“This might help. There’s a condo for sale in my building,” Ed said. “They’re not asking too much.”
“Word must’ve gotten around about the neighbours,” Jeff mumbled.
“They don’t want to live in town,” Donna said. “They moved out here to live on the farm.” Jeff’s mom was sympathetic. When she’d married Dale in the 1980s, Donna and Dale had built a new bungalow on the farm.
“All those succession planning conferences you people go to, and you still can’t make this work,” Ed said, holding up his empty coffee cup hopefully.
“Get your own. It’s in the usual place,” Donna told him.
Dale hadn’t said much. Finally he spoke up. “What if you took this house?”
That silenced everyone.
“Where would you go?” Jeff asked.
“Your mom and I could get a place in town. Not the condo next door to you, Dad, but we could find something.”
“You’d have to drive out here every day,” Jeff said. “And a house in town in the middle of an oil boom might cost as much as moving a new place out here.”
“Dale and Donna are no different than us,” Elaine said. “They want to be here, where the business is.”
No other solution was coming to mind. They were all quiet, thinking, and in the silence they all plainly heard the toddler’s first word. Elaine’s jaw fell. The Hansons weren’t above a few curse words, but this was not the word any mom would want to hear from her toddler.
“There’s one for the baby book!” Ed said.
“I tried not to say that in front of him,” Jeff moaned.
Elaine reddened. “It might have been me… when I saw that raccoon.”
“That’s it,” Dale said. “We’re moving in a new house for you two. Make appointments with the banker and the accountant. We’ll have to find a way.” CG
