Five Tons and Counting...

The never-ending supply of junk may be slowing... Frank has hauled away many trailer loads of scrap, totaling more than five tons so far. There is still the aluminum pile left, plus the odds and ends that can't be scrapped, but the bulk of the yard is cleared and the pile in the driveway dwindling.

It goes without saying that Frank has achieved "our new best friend" status.

Here are some more of the relics that we have dragged out of the brush and the basement:

Weekend #2

Saturday involved a full day of clearing away more stuff from around and under the house. Russell spent the bulk of the day in the "basement," a crawl space under the southeast corner of the house. The combination of tools and shoes continued in the basement, with the addition of some landscape paintings, electrical motors, antlers, boxes of screws, crutches, Xmas decorations, photographic chemicals, false teeth samples, cigar boxes, 7UP six-packs circa 1990, a spyglass, a marksman's medal, Listerine, and one gigantic light bulb.

Steve from down the street hung out most of the day, salvaging a few pieces of metal for future sculptures. Frank, another neighbor, came by with a trailer for metal scraps that he will haul away for free!

I worked on consolidating the shoe collection, then clearing out the northeast corner of the house. Lots of small piles of junk, tons of flower pots and planters, a half-buried table saw, a bottle of rum, and several empty oil drums.

One of my favorite oddities in the whole property is the Jesus in the birdhouse. It sits on a post under the huge coast live oak. Helena and Tadeusz may have remained religious after emigrating from Poland, or maybe it was just a function of habit, but regardless, the little hints of religion emerge in the 23rd Psalm plaque tucked in the kitchen windowsill and the angel tchotchoke in the planter. The horseshoes nailed inside the kitchen and garage doorways may indicate a superstitious layer to their spirituality as well.

We finished the day by tearing out the gardening shelves by the back porch, revealing more of the wonderful boulders that could make a funky garden grotto someday.

Shoes for Thought

Several pairs of shoes help to trace the melancholy history behind the house...

Poland, 1939.

A young girl was walking to school. A truck full of soldiers pulled up, plucked her off the street, and forced her onto a train bound for a Nazi work camp.

Somewhere along the way, she lost her shoes.

Helena spent the next six years in the camp doing hard labor in the fields, translating for patients and doctors in the camp hospital, and enduring sexual abuse from Nazi guards. As a reward for her compliance, Helena finally earned a pair of shoes: patent leather soldier's boots (pictured right).

Helena entered the camp at age fourteen. When she was twenty, the camp was liberated. Any family or friends she had were gone, killed or lost in the war. Helena and some fellow prisoners decided to take free passage on a steamship bound for the United States. They arrived in New Orleans on the Fourth of July. Eventually Helena made her way to Southern California, married another work camp survivor, had one son, and settled in a little white house in Vista. The details of her life are not yet clear, but from the artifacts we have unearthed, it's evident that Helena and her husband were collectors, tinkerers, and gardeners.

And then there are the shoes.

I have not been able to count them all, but there must be more than a hundred pairs stacked in the old trailers, tucked in the crawlspace under the house, and buried in the yard. Every color and style you could imagine, but all of them size 6 1/2 and very uncomfortable-looking. The fact that we found several plaster casts of feet in a special fabric-lined case might indicate an obsession with finding the perfect pair. A perfectly understandable obsession, if you lost your shoes on a fateful day in 1939 and then had to wear your abuser's boots in order to survive.


[My thanks to Vikki, a neighbor who shared Helena's story and photos with me before I even bought the house.]

Garden of Plenty

Thanks to our horticultural friends John and Pam, we now can appreciate the great variety of plants and trees on the property. Some of the flora are:

=crape myrtle
=jacaranda
=bottlebrush
=San Diego red bouganvillea
=dwarf pomegranate
=twisted juniper
=louquat
=geraniums
=coast live oak
=giant bird of paradise
=jade plants
=mock orange
=Canary Island date palm
=fortnight lily
=toyon christmas holly
=foxtail agave
=carob trees
=cotoneaster
=marguerite daisy
=Norfolk Island pines
=apricot tree
=tangerine tree
=lemon tree
=Modesto ash
=oleander
=Guinea gold vine
=star jasmine

Weekend #1

The closing is done, the locks are changed, so let the rehab begin! This was our first weekend of working on the "new" house, and the yard is where we started the clean-up.



The two old trailers parked in the yard held tools, movie projectors, typewriters, transistor radios, model planes and boats, and many, many pairs of high heeled shoes in their original boxes. We cleaned out the trailers and then sawed them up for disposal. In addition to several obvious heaps of junk, many relics and oddities lay half buried near trees and shrubs. In one corner of the driveway we found at least 5 or 6 engine blocks, 8 or 9 ammo boxes, rusty wheels, tools, chairs, lamps, and assorted metal objects.

The find of the day: a grenade launcher!