Chapter 4

I began storing the lawn equipment in my new larger barn building. I was interested in buying another truck for cash. I remembered something one of the white collar criminals on the farm used to say. Set up a credit record. I had been doing that for the couple of years. I was still living in my grandpa’s shack and it was truly in bad shape. So even though I had some small items and my utilities, I didn’t have any serious credit references. I wanted the truck, but I held off on it. Instead I bought a camper trailer on Craig’s List.

Of course it wasn’t perfect, so I agreed to buy it as is. But only if he would deliver it the hundred miles to Sparta. I paid him a deposit of one thousand dollars. The balance of two grand was due when the trailer was sitting on my land. The seller got it parked in my new large barn. The trailer took about one forth of the inside floor space.

The electric wiring done on the barn which allowed me to hook up the trailer had been one of the things I did first. I still got my water by pumping it from the spring. At that time I added a fifty gallon removable tank to the rear of my truck. Then the water from the truck got pumped into an external tank on the gravel floor of the barn, but it was outside the camper. I brought my counter top hot water heater aka the restaurant grade coffee maker without any guts in it, from the shack. It sat on the counter when I heated hot water for a bath, but in the corner of the barn when I didn’t need hot water. I arranged a plastic water line from the tank outside the trailer to the kitchen sink. Of course it was cold water, but I could get it into the industrial coffee pot, or the mister coffee from there. I figured that was all I needed.

The refrigerator was a little smaller than the large one I had bought for the shack, but it was adequate. The camper also had a butane gas cook top. I was sure it had been replaced since it was a unit which was permanently mounted, but appeared to have been free standing at some point in time. I kept the refrigerator and electric stove from the shack. I just stored them in the barn.

The trailer had one full sized bed in the rear bedroom, then it had a sofa that became a half bed on demand. The camper was all I needed. I thought I was finished chopping wood once I moved into the trailer. I bought a one hundred and twenty gallon LP tank, which was just inside the door of the barn. It was near to the small LP tanks on the tongue of the trailer.

The man who delivered the 120 pound sized LP tank explained about the service. I found the line to the LP heater, then traced the line back to the front of the trailer, from there I ran a new line to the larger tank. The smallest tank on the front of the trailer I left attached to the counter top cook unit. It was a mess. But with the addition of the tiny microwave, from the shack, had everything I needed. Well I did once I moved the satellite TV and the internet lines to the barn.

I decided to cut down on the gas heating requirements by buying a wood stove. So I returned to cutting wood to heat the barn after all. I had two heat sources in case of a natural disaster. It was going to take another month or two to get the barn where I really wanted it. The best thing about the barn was that I was able to use cash to finish it. The builder took a break from working on the barn to celebrate Christmas with his family. I didn’t mind since I was living in the trailer by then. He came in after the first of the new year to build the loft. It was really nothing but a storage space above the ceiling joists. Storage space mostly ran down the center of the building. The edges didn’t have enough head room.

Since I had moved everything I wanted from the Shack, where I had lived the last four years, I kind of got nostalgic about grandpa’s shack, for about a day. I did a quick estimate of the cost of the barn and figured it was close to fifteen grand just for the shell. Even thought I lived in it by the time it was completely finished, it was still just a barn on the outside. That appealed to me for some reason. I guess it was that I still appeared to be very near homeless. At least I did to anyone who just looked at me casually, which most folks did.

By the first of February I was completely moved into the barn. I grew bored about that same time. I was doing all the work that came my way, but there wasn’t much. I had my truck door advertising, and the fellow who owned the diner allowed me to put a small sign on his bulletin board. That wasn’t free, but I didn’t mind the hundred bucks every three months that he charged me.

I didn’t need the money, but I did need the work. On my books I made enough money from the gardening and landscaping to pay my small living expenses. I just couldn’t show my true net worth. The fifty K I had set aside to be laundered was what I used to pay my household expenses and business expenses. The fifty K from ‘under my mattress’ provided the cash to pay for the barn. Juggling the money was a pain in the ass. But I learned as I went along. Before summer I set up a new bank account complete with a card swiping system. That was used only for the landscape business, and the trash hauling business.

I did a lot of estate clean outs for the not so well off senior citizens, and their children. Trina even got into that business as a consultant. We were no longer having regularly scheduled sex, so she was a good partner. She helped me set up the rules for the estate cleaning business. The client set a date for me to do my thing. They had until 8AM on that date to get anything they wanted from the property. After that date it went to my company as trash or part of my fee.

Usually the property was cleared within forty eight hours. I brought the equipment trailer along to haul away the trash. The back of the truck was reserved for things Trina deemed worth keeping. She and I often fucked, while on the job, in other people’s houses. It was a bit weird, but it was also erotic.

All that was about keeping a little busy before the summer growing season started. When that came up, I stopped almost all my outside work to concentrate on growing my crops. From June until October my time was spent in working the weed business.