Operation Lemon Twist

My great-grandfather, Lemon Miller, standing on the front porch of the Somerset property.

Well, the year 2018 is drawing to a close. August, September, October, and now November have all slipped away. The old Lemon Miller property in Somerset is tucked away for the winter.  And I look back wistfully on this weird task that had engrossed so much of my energy and attention during these months.

 

The place still has no tenants save one, my cousin Patrick McGuire (who prefers to be called Pat). He continues to hobble around as he deals with his right knee replacement. Pat’s discouraged about his progress. He does little else than watch TV or go to the movies, and barely manages caring for himself and his cat, Jinksy. (His cat was aptly named—it seems like Pat’s whole life has been jinxed with bad luck in so many ways). For over three months we’ve been waiting for the plumber to knock out a list of things. We’re still waiting. Of prime importance to Pat is the plumbing and venting of a washer and dryer we’re looking to stack in his apartment.

 

Being on this plumber’s gauntlet is a uniquely irritating experience. The two available apartments can be shown, though occupancy still depends upon the plumber finishing up. The wait is really frustrating for both of us. The plumber is the only uncooperative tradesman I’ve encountered in Somerset during the whole process. His being busy is one thing, but ignoring an old customer for such an unreasonable amount of time is just plain rude. Still, no trick in the book works to get him over there. Lord knows, I've tried. 

 

The job of being a landlord is one of my least favorite roles. Dealing with tradesmen is (normally) a breeze compared with interacting with tenants. With difficult tenants a landlord needs to be mercenary, direct, assertive, and generally unmerciful. The first evicted tenant was a young couple and their three kids. They left willingly, abandoning the premises. I had little to do with them and in fact felt a bit sorry for them (even though they owed two months back rent and left a ton of debris on every level of the house).

 

The other tenant was a scheming, unworthy, slug-like woman, a drinker, and her worthless 22-year old grandson, both of whom made my job a more thankless task than it already was. These occupants were the residual from the former mismanagement of the place. They and the rest of their dysfunctional family were noisy, which bothered my cousin. We praise the heavens that they are now gone. However, she left an apartment in her wake whose tongue-in-groove oak floor was ruined by cat and dog piss.

 

More often than not, my humanity gets in the way of my duties as a landlord. And while I try to assist a tenant who is truly in need, someone who has encountered trouble and difficult times, I lose it when a tenant deceives me, takes advantage of my tendency to be lenient, and then shows no regard for the lease agreement. Still, it is my old-school values—of saying what I mean and meaning what I say—that help me to get the job done. Especially in this instance, when a tenant failed to show the least bit of proper care for a property with a certain sentimental value, patience ran extremely thin. Consequently, my subsequent determination to evict this last no-good tenant became personal.  

 

But all of this is behind me now and I must not bear a grudge. I have my judgments, both recorded. I still need to levy on them, or at least on one. I will do so, by-and-by (after my civil proceeding for damages).

 

The job of Mr. Fix-It is somewhat more interesting than that of Landlord. I learned quite a bit about how to go about it by going about it. The intricacies of this odyssey were memorialized in prior essays on this blog. Enough said, I suppose, except that now I look back and reflect on the entire drama as a whole.

 

I refer to it as Operation Lemon Twist in honor of my Great Grandfather Lemon Miller who originally bought the place in 1921. My intention was to restore the house as close to its former glory as I could. His daughter, my Great Aunt Jenny, who resided there for over 45 years, would probably be gratified with the care I took in doing so. Lord knows, the place needed attention and getting it squared away sure put me in a twist. But it’s nice to behold the final product and to have made various personal relationships along the way with tradesmen, store clerks, the folks at the water company, the magistrate who presided in my eviction proceedings, and others, not the least of which was my cousin Pat.

 

More needs to be done, but under Operation Lemon Twist the place has shaped up nicely despite years of neglect to the exterior and the damage done by this last, thoughtless tenant. In the Spring I intend to rent what I call a cherry picker (a traveling crane equipped for holding a worker at the end of the boom) in order to wrap the four dormer fascia boards and paint the remaining woodwork that is up high. (Some photos of the place will soon be posted.)

 

There was another twist. During these past months, Aunt Janet added me to the deed as a joint tenant. She had offered the Somerset place to Pat. He seemed the likeliest beneficiary, given that he had retired there. But he declined. I double checked with him and sought out the reason. He just didn't want to be bothered. So I accepted Janet's kind offer.

 

At first I felt funny about it—further "twisted"—and wanted to keep it quiet. But I did note in my post of Sept. 5 (the first of three parts on my time there), "...the torch now seems to be passing to me." No one picked up on that. Soon I figured I was being silly to not let my siblings and others know about this gift. And once they found out, no one seemed to care.

 

Owning real property, as with material gain generally, brings responsibilities. Being pegged as an absentee landlord has never sat well with this natural free-spirit-rolling stone. As time unfolds time will tell how I fare as the latest in a chain of custodians.

 

Getting the daggone thing fully rented is the immediate concern. And so, a prayer goes out to the plumber to hasten to the task!—and to the property manager that she may soon find suitable new tenants for this stately old house in a neighborhood that has a "goin' down slow" feel to it these days.

 

As they say, if the mule don't die and the crick don't freeze the old Miller-McGuire house may yet see brighter days. I won't exactly pin my hopes on it. I'll just keep trying to do the best I can, which all anyone can ever do anyway.