{"id":1551,"date":"2021-04-24T08:47:24","date_gmt":"2021-04-24T16:47:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/?p=1551"},"modified":"2021-04-24T08:47:24","modified_gmt":"2021-04-24T16:47:24","slug":"on-the-purchase-of-a-house-on-mountain-valley-road-1985","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/?p=1551","title":{"rendered":"On the Purchase of a House on Mountain Valley Road, 1985"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<pre class=\"wp-block-verse\">In the year Samantha Smith died, the year\nthey captured the Night Stalker in LA,\u00a0\nI bought a house on Route 220, two floors,\nsix rooms. This house bore me along\u00a0\nfor quite a few years, from rapture\nof little boy noise to secret teenagers upstairs\nplaying games with impenetrable rules.\n\nBefore I completed the sale, Joyce, the woman\nwho owned it, died at home and it fell to her daughters\nto come and pick apart her life, tear up rooms,\neven dig up the asparagus beds in the yard.\u00a0\nYet they abandoned jars of smoked salmon\nin the basement, tintypes of unknown people\nin the shed, diaries Joyce kept where she talked\n\nof her time at the sardine cannery, how on\ngray days she would leave the house at seven,\nhope for a run on fish, some time slicing heads,\nand not a day when she would be sent home unpaid.\nShe visited her mother, helped her clean the rumps\nof root vegetables torn from the garden. She laid out\nthe hard cargo of her life\u2014her mother\u2019s gout,\n\nher own arthritic knees, the pain that twisted out\nat each step, the unpaid bills at the Apple Squeeze.\nI read each page, followed the lines of her pen,\u00a0\nlines that carved a small cave of meaning,\u00a0\nwhittled down years to kindling,\u00a0\nsmall sticks that were once her life.\n\n\nMiramar\nNo. 8   2019<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the year Samantha Smith died, the year they captured the Night Stalker in LA,\u00a0 I bought a house on Route 220, two floors, six rooms. This house bore me along\u00a0 for quite a few years, from rapture of little boy noise to secret teenagers upstairs playing games with impenetrable rules. Before I completed the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/?p=1551\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;On the Purchase of a House on Mountain Valley Road, 1985&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1551"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1552,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1551\/revisions\/1552"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/judykaber.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}