This unassuming red brick house was where we lived the first year my wife, my animals, & I lived in Lexington, Kentucky. It was owned by an elderly couple: the husband of the pair showed the house, but it was pretty obvious the wife was in charge. We were a hard sell - we had three dogs (we lied about the cats) but my wife's nerdy charms won the day. The old man was smitten with her. He would chuckle appreciatively about her when she would leave the room, as if I weren't there. We figured he would have a hands-off approach to the rental property, & we were right. He never came by. We never had to hide the cats.
It had two bedrooms upstairs we never used. Well, except for storage, & one time when someone I knew was passing through & needed a place to crash. We used the downstairs. It was a mostly pleasant place but in the spring we noticed something... odd. We called it "the zombie smell." It was an odor that seemed to emanate from the area around the bathroom that was redolent, well, of dead things. It went away in the summer but we suspected if we stayed there another year, we'd be visited by it again.
The yards - both front & back - were huge. The fence was useless, so we created a smaller area for the dogs near the back door. They didn't seem to resent that. Perhaps it was that we walked them regularly, no matter the weather. Or perhaps they observed how unhappy I was mowing that gigantic fucking yard. Which took two days. Every time. & when autumn came, & the leaves fell, well. There went my week. There was a nice woman across the street who asked if she could have my leaves for mulch, so I raked them & carried them over to her. I don't think she said a single thing to me ever again.
While I was living there, I began deejaying at WRFL, & it was a happy time. The wife was still working at Marshall & would occasionally drive to work there, staying at the house we owned there, which was for sale, but which took about a year to find buyers. She got a job at UK in the spring of 2011, so she left Marshall & West Virginia behind. I would've liked to go back & look around, but I never did.
All of my babies were well there, the last time that would be the case. I have pictures of my cat Beatrice & she seemed very fat & happy. Bronte, adopted in West Virginia, grew chubby there, too. One story of that time bears repeating. It's about how our dog Ringo almost killed everyone in the house.
Ringo, since his adoption in 2004, had always been a menace. Food-focused, he would break into locked pantries, he would knock over deep-fryers to lick the grease, he would find things on shelves or countertops like bags of tortilla chips, open them & eat them all. He was about eight when we moved into the rental on Tulsa Road. We thought he might have mellowed somewhat, since he was officially "elderly." One night the wife had prepared a bunch of sweet potatoes to be used in burritos. I suspect it was a Sunday, because she left to come pick me up, & it was probably from an RFL meeting.
We came home to find a sweet potato nightmare. The pot was off the stove, the floor & walls had remnants of orange on them, & Ringo was suspiciously fat. But worse than that, the gas stove was on. There was no flame, just gas. We believe Ringo figured out - probably through trial & error - how to open the door to the oven, use it as a springboard, & get onto the top of the stove, where the delicious yam concoction was waiting for him. But he must have accidentally jostled a knob, because he had turned on the gas. We were gone for mere minutes; had we been gone for longer - we often did drive to Louisville, or Cincinnati - the house would have been flooded with dangerous vapors.
The wife thinks it might have made them sick, but not killed them. But it was enough to make me decide to do something I cannot believe I hadn't thought of before: we started locking the dogs in the bedroom when we left. I would give them treats so they would go willingly, even eagerly, but once in there, the baying would begin. This would last until 2018, when Ringo died. The remaining three - two of which never lived with us on Tulsa Road - were never as food-focused & nefarious as Ringo. It felt weird letting them stick around when we left. Ringo, even when he was old & gray, was still quite the threat.
The wife felt burned by the buying & selling of the house in West Virginia, & swore to me that she'd wait a couple of years before looking for a home to buy - after all, we didn't know if we wanted to stay in Lexington! But in the fall of 2011, she found a house in the neighborhood she wanted to buy. That, by the way, would become our modus operandi - rent in an area, decide we liked it, buy in the same or nearby neighborhood. I was a bit irritated by this - we had just moved twice in the past two years - but she both found a place she loved & she found a place she wanted to renovate. I was mainly focused on my radio life, & taking care of both my kids & my wife.
It wasn't quite as often as it would become, but I cooked a lot more at Tulsa. I was starting to enjoy the process of following a recipe. Which was good - having become vegan in Huntington, we found that there weren't many more vegan options in Lexington. Luckily there were in Louisville & Cincinnati, which were closer, & which we did visit often. As I mentioned.
In all, I enjoyed that house on Tulsa Road. I just looked through old pictures (old! it was a decade ago!) but couldn't find one of the front of the house. The place never felt like ours, & I hate corner houses. But I had that sense of freedom one has when one escapes a terrible situation, like we did, when we left Huntington.
