JANUARY DAZE

Most of our work was in the city, we'd meet at the shop and load up the tools needed for the day in either Steve's van or Roger's truck, then head up-town. I had let the bank repossess a new Nisson when I'd left Bellinger and Krause, I now drove Gin's Gremblin or caught a ride with Steve who lived nearby.

We'd just finished framing a huge contemporary house for a painting contractor, Chip Filbin. I bid on the full length deck with screened-in summer-room, four sets of stairs leading to different levels, down to a future swimming pool. The bid was $3,800.00 just for labor. Chip signed the contract on the twenty-eighth. I told him we would start the deck in a month because we had a lot of shop projects we had to finish first. What I didn't tell him was that we also had a large siding job in the works, a four story building right on main street in Endicott. We would put Chip's job off for two months in order to complete that job before deadline and possible fines.

I wish I would have recieved over-time pay for all the hours spent doing book-work. Blueprints had to be drawn, proposals written, taxes figured, material ordered. Gin took another southern trip to her relative's for two weeks, I was so busy I hardly noticed. I felt like I was doing all the work and giving two thirds of the money away. But there was nothing I wouldn't do to keep this business together, I didn't realize that I was turning into my ex partner. When Roger wanted a day off to hunt grouse, I told him if he went hunting he was fired, even though we were all partners and I knew better than to make him mad. He went hunting and Steve and I went to work.

We had a pine hutch half-built for Steve's in-laws, an order for a complete set of kitchen cabinets, and dozens of other projects in varying stages of completion in the shop. Two of our friends were hired to try and catch up with the work load, but more often than not they wouldn't show up on time or came in with hang overs and weren't worth beans. The landlord was dead-set against any and all alcohol and we had been warned repetedly not to drink in his barn. What he didn't know is that we had all quit drinking at the shop when Dave ran his finger through the jointer last fall, just before he quit to take a job closer to his home in Towanda, a job without sharp instruments! The refrigerator was converted to a fireproof cabinet for our paints and stains, I still use it today.

Every boom has it's bust, ours came that year in many forms. The landlord spotted a customer with a beer in hand leaving the shop and gave us a month to move out. IBM decided they needed Steve's in-laws down in Tennessee again and Steve followed again. Roger quit to become a janitor with more time for hunting and fishing. I filled my hayloft with tools and searched for a new shop.

Joe, the Amish butcher from LeRaysville came on the 30th and butchered two pigs. That left seven of the litter of 11 that Angel gave us six months before. Angel was a Christmas present to Gin two years before, Scott and I picked Angel up from the farmer early on Christmas morning and before bringing her into the cabin we wrapped a red ribbon around her neck. Gin took lots of pictures of Angel under the tree, on the couch, and eating from the cat's dishes in the kitchen. I bartered for the use of a boar when Angel was of age, swapping fifty fence posts and feeding Walter for a month. In four months I would trade more posts to a different farmer for the use of his hog, George.

I bought my first Dodge truck from a relative, a '73 two-wheel drive, I gave Uncle Marty $250.00 and a pig for it. Now I was in business again, I hired another brother-in-law, Travis, and when Ricky came back home from Mississippi, I put him to work with us. Rick had just left his third wife, he had nine children to support and I couldn't keep him busy enough. I'd taken a liking to the slower pace of sole-proprietorship. He helped Travis and I finish our youngest brother's house that I had started the year before with my other brothers then he took a job as an electrician up-town. Travis worked with me off and on for eight months, until my youngest sister,Tonia gave him a son and a reason to find a 'real' job. He went to work in a slaughter-house.

Larry and his wife had spent the last six years in the Bahamas, he was an electronics engineer. They had decided to move back to Pennsylvania a few years back and bought a ten acre pine woods just up the road from Sonrise. One look at his pine forest and I brought out my blueprints from storage, revising them to fit with my vague idea of buying some of Larry's trees. It would be several years before this dream became a reality, but it gave me hope again of building Gin a real house, hope that had been buried twice before.

I cut a lot of firewood from the pasture that year. It was beginning to take shape, we'd enclosed a half-acre for Daisy with locust posts and barbed wire the previous spring, next year we'd seed it with hay chaff and spread some of the growing piles of manure. Joe came to butcher Angel, she'd given us 17 piglets and 327 pounds of pork, bacon, and hams, plus enough fat to feed the woodpeckers and chickadees all winter long.

Uncle Robert took me truck shopping, after three days of searching we found the first of a long line of Dodge 4x4s.It was a blue '79, the first year of double, square headlights. It had an electrical problem so the owner let us have her for $500.00. I named her Ma Par, gave her a ladder rack, tool box and gun rack. She already had white spoked wheels and wide radials, a perfect rolling tool box, material warehouse, and office. Her heater worked fine. I traded her a.m. radio for a tape deck and added a CB. The stock bench seat had already been swapped for a split bucket with console large enough for my books, cassettes, and first-aid kit.

Later that year I met Keith Jones and Peter Pier, two guys from New Jersey who bought a local farm. All my neighbors said they were queer but when I was hired to built a dog run for them I found two of the nicest people around. They had five garages with the farm and I asked if they might rent one of them to me. We worked out a barter deal, I would provide one day's labor for one months rent. I moved my woodworking equiptment from the hayloft for what I hoped would be the last time, I was wrong.

While pumping gas at the local store, an old friend pulled up and told me his brother had just commited suicide, he was almost in tears and asked me to have a drink with him. I hadn't drank in almost a year but said I'd follow him to the pub for a quick one, I had chores to do at home. At the bar, we talked about the old days, drank a couple shots of tequila with beer chasers, then I headed home. I woke up two days later in the hospital unable to move. I had broken my back but worse yet, I had totaled Ma Par. I was out of business again.

Roger and I went fishing together the morning he came to pick the cabinets up from the shop. He augered four holes through the ice at Heighs pond while I built a fire in one of the pits. Three hours in the 14 degree wind was enough for me, we had filled a pail with perch and crappy and still had to clean them.

It had been a rough three months, the first one spent in the hospital, the next two laying in a borrowed bed because "a waterbed isn't good for broken backs," the doctor said. Our cabin wasn't built with two beds in mind, there wasn't room to move if I could. Gin had shipped Daisy and her second calf, Rosi off to a neighbor's because she didn't have time to milk her. She had taken a job at a departmant store up-town when I had my accident and had her hands full with the other chores and taking care of me.

We brought the cows home on the last day of January. I took over the household chores along with the barn chores. I would carry my shotgun with me on my walks to the shop and filled the freezer with grouse, rabbits and squirrels. Come summertime, I switched to a fishing pole. I felt like I had gone back in time a hundred years, it was a calm, reflective period and I had many talks with our Maker.

A friend who lived near one of the lakes walked over one afternoon to ask if I wanted to go to a computer class with him. He would pay the cost of the course and do the driving, he just didn't want to go alone. I told him sure, I didn't know the first thing about computers but was willing to learn. Going to college gave me the confidence to take the GED test later that year.

Keith Jones kept me busy remodeling the farmhouse and later that year he had me build a chicken coop for him. Both Peter and Keith worked as computer programers and woud often be gone to New York or New Jersey for weeks at a time, I took care of their birds while they were gone. I started building a coop of my own that summer from scrap lumber and a truckload of hard maple I got in exchange for building a wood chute in a nearby farmhouse.

Larry and his wife had moved into the house I'd built them and we started talking about the trees. He wanted to get settled with a good job first, have a child or two, then built an addition, clear a section of the woods for a lawn, plant an orchard...he had many plans, he had learned from his big brothers mistakes and I knew his dreams would come true.

That fall I bought another truck. A wreck I found in a farmer's back pasture. A friend towed it to our driveway and I began the task of rebuilding Ma Par. It would be another year and five more parts- trucks before she was driveable and I would return to what was left of Bellinger Brother's Construction. I have never changed the name of my business even though there weren't any brothers but me, I'm still dreaming of 'The Plan'.