Life in the Village

Long ago, my husband, Marc, and I lived as almost starving students in a Quonset hut that was part of Polo Village, the U of A’s married student housing facility. We’d married earlier than we’d planned to get access to one of the limited number of available units, but the absurdly low 47 bucks a month rent and food were about the only living expenses we could cover.  We were content without other not-quite necessities such as a phone or a car. We admired Stewart Brand and his Whole Earth Catalog and wanted to co-evolve as well as two previously well-sheltered suburban kids could.

 

Daily life in the Village resembled camping in many ways and was just about as secure. Few people even bothered to use the simple spring locks on their front and only doors. Most couples had dogs that wandered the neighborhood and cats that availed themselves of unscreened windows necessarily left open for ventilation. The dirt and dust drifted in constantly from the unpaved streets. The gaps in the cave-like arc above us meant we were wet when it rained, and sweaty when the summer sun burned down on the ribbed steel panels that were both wall and roof.

We had to adapt to being very, very close to nature while living in that 400 square foot hut. After about six months there, I reached up to a shelf I’d nailed to the kitchen wall and when I had my copy of The Joy of Cooking” in hand, threw it across the room with a shriek to raise the dead. It was a book in form only, just cover boards over a mass of moiling little black bodies. There were no pages left under or around the hundreds of cockroaches.  Another time I was taking a shower in the minuscule bathroom when the two foot square metal floor pan broke from the rusted screws that fastened it to the painted greenboard of the stall.  It dropped to the ground below, with me—so not like Aphrodite-on the-clam-shell—riding the pan down the seven or so inches to the gravel beneath the plywood floor.  A trickle of water falling from the still-intact showerhead dripped on me as I watched a variety of displaced insects and small reptiles hop, slither and scurry away from my wet feet.

Our miniscule rent would have kept us in Polo Village far longer had it not been for my mother-in-law’s aversion to vermin. Mother Harriet visited us frequently, but for over two years was unaware that we were not as animal-free as our allergies would demand. We set humane traps in hidden corners, but like rodents everywhere, our cohabitants seemed to be born knowing how to lift the peanut butter bait with impunity. I tried to capture a few field mice using rubber gloves and spaghetti tongs. That resulted in a net loss of territory in the pantry and of dignity later in the Student Health Office when I asked for a check on mouse rabies.

 We lived in a tacit truce with our house-pests. They had the advantage of numbers since our allergies negated any possibility of population control via a cat or terrier. As I long as I put every bit of our food in glass jars or the refrigerator, the mice (thankfully, they were just that, no rats were involved at any time) could have the seeds that blew in the windows or grew under the floorboards. They were pretty well fed in any case. Most nights, a scratching run, run, pause, run, pause, run followed by rustling plastic would remind me that yet again I had left the bread out on the counter.

Perhaps my continual carelessness made them bolder as well as fatter. One time I was sitting with Mother Harriet at my Formica dinette table wedged in the alcove defined by the curve of the wall when her expression froze.  She was staring at the upright piano only five feet across the room. A plump brown mouse was bobbing up and down on the middle volume pedal. It scrambled across the indoor/outdoor carpet and literally over Mother Harriet’s sandaled foot. She shuddered violently and started screaming as the mouse slid under and out of the door.

One week later, Papa-Bob and Mother-Harriet  picked us up for Sunday dinner back

at their house and on the way, turned up a side street off Speedway. As Papa-Bob drove north, Mother Harriet asked how did we like the small red brick house on the right?  I said that it was a cute little place. “Glad to hear that”, she said, “You’re moving in on Monday.”  My in-laws made it a point of honor not to interfere, but a Jewish mother is an irresistible protective force. We lived in that cozy little bungalow, roach and rodent free, through graduate school.