Sugaring Ben

Chapter 1: Frazzled Sometimes I felt challenged by the weather. The wind during the middle of October. The blistering sun in a humid August. A heaping amount of snow over the holidays. Rain during the springtime. The weather became my life, feeding me and paying my bills. I attended Temple for four years and worked at WJTW in Johnstown right out of college. The middle of Pennsylvania became nauseating for me, and I had to get the hell out of there before I lost my mind because of all its grassy hills and minimal population. So I moved northwest, to Radar, next to Lake Erie, and surrounded myself with the small towns of West End, Templeton, and Dunbar. A man could be happy in Radar at thirty-four, right? I was happy and almost thirty-five. I calculated the saltbox with its steeply pitched roof at nine hundred square feet, cozy for one person. The catslide roof reached the first story in the back. The central chimney warmed the place quite well during the winter months. The abode felt compact and had very small windows of diamond-paned casements. To my surprise, the place stayed cool in the summer and quite warm during the winter. Most saltboxes existed in and around New England, but I was fortunate to purchase the one on Lakewind Drive in 2009 from one of my friend’s parents, Lou and Becky Reese. The wooden shingles were original; a holdover from the days of thatching. I knew that few original saltboxes survived throughout time, and was pleased to know that mine was of historical value, spanning back to the days of the Iroquois Indians. I had neighbors to my left and right, but they weren’t visible. Old Lady Gwendolyn Tucker—she looked exactly like Michelle Obama, passing as the president’s wife’s twin—lived on the property’s right side and minded her manners. At fifty-seven, she became a widow, currently lived alone, and reached out to senility with an unfriendly hand. None of her six children visited her, although she had twelve million dollars in the bank, which none of them were getting when she died. To the property’s left resided a young bride and groom, Yarley and Colten Bitter. He worked as an architect, and she dabbled in freelance writing. Both nodded at me in passing when necessary and, like Lady Tucker, minded their manners. Not even four months after moving into the saltbox, Beginnings arrived. I thought her a rare breed of feline with her oil-colored pelt and golden eyes. She purred upon our greeting, wanted inside, and mewed for some milk. I believed her to be seven months old, not a day older, and she whirled around my legs as I served the saucer-covered milk that she desired. Sometimes an outside cat, she never ran away, although she had plenty of opportunities. Somehow, someway, she and I had become best friends and ate together in the kitchen, napped on a daily basis side by side in the sunroom, and occasionally took walks to the lake, but neither of us enjoyed much swimming. Beginnings. I loved her name. Something told me that she liked it, too. How couldn’t I love her since she loved me in return?