It's amazing how time flies.
This time last year I was beginning my hunt for a home. After 6 offers on 5 houses that all fell apart for different reasons, I was starting to get discouraged. Then, one April day, I went driving around with my agent and my roommate Tim. We looked at probably 10 houses that Saturday, with varying degrees of success. Just after noon we decided to look at a house that we knew little about on the north side of East Nashville. As we pulled down the street, we passed a large woman on foot carrying a queen-sized, well-worn mattress on her back. That's odd, I thought, but we kept driving and found the house that I would go on to officially purchase a month later.
But this is not the story of my house. No, this is the story of the mattress woman, who I will call Cloris Leachman because I can't remember her actual name and she has the leathery skin of the real Ms. Leachman. Mostly, just picture a slightly darker version of Charo.
Turns out, Cloris owns the house next to mine. After a handful of random encounters with this woman over the last 6 months, I have learned the following about her life:
Cloris was born in 1940, and immigrated from Puerto Rico at a young age. In the early 1970s, she toured as a backup singer and dancer for Dean Martin on three world tours, including stops across North America and Europe. After three years of employment, it was revealed she had undergone a sex change and was promptly fired for what they considered fraud.
I'm not sure exactly what happened over the next thirty years, but I know that she married a man at some point. He currently weighs over 600 pounds, and is confined to a wheel-chair from the combination of a back injury suffered in a swimming accident and his obesity.
Seven years ago Cloris and her husband bought their current residence. She walks to the grocery store several times a week to keep her blood pressure down. She collects "antiques" in her back yard, and plans on opening it as a store to the public early this summer. Rather than try and plant real grass in her yard, she has decided to take drastic measures. Her front yard is covered in bushes, lawn ornaments, and a stagnant pond. She has spread rugs and doors across her back yard in an effort to kill all plant life and create a walkway for her "store", including across the "mushy" part where they filled in the pool her husband hurt himself in.
Cloris knows all the gossip in the neighborhood, as she spends the majority of her warm-weather days in her yard and the majority of her cold-weather days looking out her front window. She has informed me of several interesting facts:
- The tree in my front yard was once lit on fire by the neighborhood kids on Halloween because the people who were renting the house at the time didn't have any candy.
-The house five down and across the street was once used as a crack house. The owners subsequently burned it down to collect the insurance money. (I found this out when the re-built house burned down AGAIN last Saturday morning...)
And, I think she still thinks Tim and I are gay, despite several attempts to tell her otherwise. She says its ok, she doesn't care because she used to be a guy.
Oh Cloris, you are just one of the things that make life on Edith Ave so interesting!
In her honor, I give you:
