A Very, Very, Very Fine House

by Donna Schoenkopf

I wrote lists and rewrote them over and over again.

I added, subtracted, multiplied and divided until numbers swam in front of my eyes, not meaning much of anything anymore.

I drew pictures. Made shapes out of my grandson’s building blocks. Looked at magazines and websites.

I read want ads, always looking for a way to do it.

The ugly, heartbreaking truth was ... I could not afford to live in California any longer. Not if I wanted to retire.

The retirement seminar I had gone to made the point perfectly clear. It was sponsored by my teachers’ union, UTLA. I also had had a couple of one-on-one meetings with my very own personal adviser from California State Teachers Retirement System.

What I learned was that if I worked seven days a week and all summer, every summer, I could earn a bunch of money and put it into my retirement account and have a little bit to work with.

So I signed on for Saturday School. And taught summer school. And taught after school. I racked up salary points on Sundays when I’d go to museums and historic places around L.A. and filled scrapbooks with learning games and photos to illustrate commonplace things for vocabulary work.

An aside:

Almost every child needs extra help in the Inner City because all standard tests, all textbooks, all material is geared to white middle class kids, not the Latino or black kids who were the only ethnicities at our school. Imagine yourself reading passages in a book about emtaldes, rongermons and liliminions and tons of other words you’d never seen before and everyone assuming you knew what they were and then grading you on your reading comprehension. And maybe you knew the words you read but they were used in such a way that they just didn’t make sense. A tiny example from my own teaching experience when I was reading with a group of children. We came to the phrase “skipping a rock over the water.” There was nothing in their life experience that they could pull out to get any meaning from that series of weird words. The look of puzzlement on their faces ... and there was NO way to figure it out. They had never skipped a rock over water. Or watched anyone skip a rock over water.

But I digress.

I worked very, very hard. I taught and taught and loved every single second of it. I learned so much that I will never be able to express it all. But it is in me. And makes me richer.

And as I worked, I began to plan. I began to plan because, being a teacher, I had finally learned organizational skills. When I first began teaching at the ripe old age of forty-five, I thought all I needed was my flair, my enthusiasm, and my winning ways. Hah! It took three really crazy years of not being able to find ANYTHING in the classroom to get it into my thick skull that if you’re not organized as a third grade teacher ... you die.

I thought, in those three dense, final years, about what I’d have when I retired at the age of sixty-four. I counted every penny many times over.

I didn’t have an IRA or anything else like it. I had had an IRA a couple of times during my teaching career and lost everything TWICE because of the wild swings of the stock market. It became clear to me that capitalism was a shit system, and that the very real possibility of me getting nothing just when I was retiring was a real one.

So I decided to just rely on my California State Teachers Retirement fund and make it work.

But how? Where?

My dear sister, Annie, was living with me at the time and went on the Internet and found that Oklahoma, land of my teens and early adulthood, land of pretty countryside and old friends and family, was literally the cheapest place in the western hemisphere to live.

I flew there three times, aching with fear about spending the money, and looked at property. I knew I wanted the country. I craved clean air and wildflowers. But I could find nothing that suited me.

Then, in a fit of exasperation, I grabbed the lapels of the neophyte real estate agent, pulled him close to me, and growled, “Do NOT let me go back to California without buying anything.”

He tossed a list of properties at me and fled. That afternoon I went to the first property and there it was.

It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. Just four miles outside of a small town. Beautiful hills, a pond, ash, oak, cottonwood, hemlock and redbud trees. Deep blue skies with fluffy white clouds. And air as sweet as sweet could be.

This was it.

I called my agent, we hightailed it over to the real estate office and signed the papers just in time to get me back to the motel and off to catch my plane.

Then I needed to think about the house I would build.

Those blocks. Those drawings. Those pages in magazines. Environmental websites. Governmental websites. I learned and looked and thought. And came up with the materials and design for my very own, my VERY own house.

My design. My place. My life.

And then I taught my students the songs “When I’m Sixty-Four” and “Our House.” We sang those songs many, many times that year. I knew they loved those songs because I could see the sweet dreaminess in their eyes as the words floated in the air. Yes. They wanted a house just like that. With two cats in the yard, a fire in the fireplace, and flowers in the vase. They would have grandchildren on their knee, Vera, Chuck, and Dave.

I did really need to retire. I was getting old in elementary school terms. Sixty-one was a bit over the hill for a teacher of eight-year-olds. The kids are full of energy. They are fast-paced. They require a lot of personal care. A teacher dare not sit or it’s all over. The day is a whirl of activity, motion, surge.

I had worked my fingers to the bone, especially the last three years, and was in my penultimate year at 61st. The second grade teacher who would be funneling her kids to my final class the following year brought them all over to meet me the last week of school. In they marched. Delightful.

One little boy, a tiny, adorable, ravishingly cute, impish, very black child, looked me dead in the eye and said, “Don’t you think you’re a little old for this job? You’ve got a lot of wrinkles.”

I cannot tell you how much I loved him! He hit the nail on the head. I looked him back in the eye and said, “Yes. And that’s why you are my very last class. Heh, heh, heh.” I cackled like a witch.

I was getting old. There was no doubt at all.

The road moves smoothly along as you drive on the two lane highway up and down tree covered hills.

It’s summer. Hot. Humid. Suffocating. But green beyond belief. It feels tropical and dense. Full of life. Vibrating with life.

Keep driving. Pass by the small Oklahoma town of Tecumseh. Ignore all signs, they’ll only confuse you. Just head south whenever you have to decide which way to go.

On the west side of the road is a beautiful pond, its silken surface unbroken except for the ducks and their motorboat ripples as they paddle. You might be lucky enough to see them tip over and bob upside down, looking for morsels.

A little further and there’s the rumored house of the daughter of Mel Gibson. It turns out to be just that ... a rumor. But it’s beautiful—two stories, with gables and dormers and a winding driveway lined with trees.

Further yet, a ranch on the eastern side of the road with its portal of wrought iron and horses standing on the hill. Just like a picture. Pretty.

It’s coming up on four miles from town, so slow down. It’s dangerous out here on Killer Highway 177, and making a left turn on top of a hill with a twist in the road on the other side so you can’t see what’s coming ... could be the death of you. Seriously.

At the crest of this hill there’s an abandoned restaurant and another larger building which was a sometimes tool store, sometimes juke joint. Used to be Sherry Lynn’s and Elmer’s. They’re long gone. Lots of hard luck and running just ahead of the people they owe. Me, for instance. But, as Son Eric said, “Just let it go, Mom.”

Slow waaaayyyy down, make sure your turn blinker is on, and pray that this time you’ll make it across the road to the gravel/sand covered county road that leads to my house.

Sooner Road is a yellowish ocher color. On the left, a little way down, is a cluster of mailboxes. It has a wooden planter box under them, built by Neighbor Jim for us all. It sometimes has wildflowers growing there unless the heat and lack of rain prevents it. My mailbox is the one with the Obama sticker on it. It says, “Yes, We Did!” I, as usual, stick out like a sore thumb. Not one of my neighbors has mentioned it. They’re too polite.

On the right side of the road, across from the mailboxes, is Cowboy Lane with Neighbor Jim’s log house. His handiwork is everywhere ... walls, ceilings, floors. He loves wood and work. Steve’s house is next door. He’s been a neighbor of Jim’s for twenty years and has survived a tornado and a mini tornado, and moved to this neighborhood before anyone else. Across the road, Rick’s mobile home. His kids visit me now and then. They walk the county road to my house and last time got my “no Styrofoam” lesson. I am the Styrofoam Cop. I’ve taken it on as my sacred duty.

Keep going.

There’s a steep driveway, now covered in blue-black shattered shale. It is Orval and Shirley’s driveway. Orval put the shale there because every time it rained, and it REALLY rains around here, the driveway became a rutted mud hill. So Orval bought shale from Dave—or Smitty, if you’re a gravel hauler like he is. When Dave dumped the shale it was in huge pieces, the size of a submarine sandwich. It took about a month of driving on it to break it into perfect little pieces that dug themselves into the red clay and became this beautiful driveway up the hill.

Orval’s workshop is where Rosie goes when she can’t stand the dogs anymore. Once she lived there for four months. I’ve rescued her three times now. When she gets home she falls more and more in love with me. As of late, she has been my constant companion and will not go outside unless I make her. Which I do. Because she peed on my bed after two days of refusing the outside world. So in the morning I toss her out and she comes back either in an hour or an afternoon.

You’re now at the end of the county road. There’s an orange cattle gate on your left. Turn through it and there, through the trees on the left is a hand painted wooden sign nailed to an oak tree with my name and address. The gravel drive continues ahead, but that’s Dave’s/Smitty’s house. Until I nailed that sign up everyone, and I mean the Federal

Express guys and the UPS guys, ended up at Dave’s.

Dave and Kim and Trent live next door to me. I’ve taught Trent in kindergarten when I’ve substitute taught at the Early Childhood Center in Tecumseh. He’s a serious, handsome, very nice boy. Kim is beauty contest beautiful and leaves at 6:30 every morning to go to work all the way in Midwest City. Dave leaves in his gigantic gravel truck as early as 4:00 in the morning or as late as noon. Just depends on business.

So make sure you turn left on my driveway. It winds through a lovely fairyland of a forest until you can just make out my house through the trees.

This is where I live.

Why I live here is what FourStory is all about. I live here because it is affordable. I live here because it is sustainable. I live here because it is healthy. I live here because it is peaceful. I live here because it is beautiful.

Affordable.

Every week I write about what happens to me here. I am the Oklahoma reporter. I try to paint a picture of what it’s like to have a dream, figure out how to make it real, and keep a roof over one’s head. I write about what irks me and pleases me and grosses me out.

Where you live and how you live can either be a living hell or paradise. But usually it’s both.

FourStory tapped me on the shoulder and let me talk and talk about animals and insects and weather and people and how I miss California and how I love Oklahoma.

It’s been three years now.

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