The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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Karla’s Kut Above sits below the WindyRear real estate offices right across from the fire station. We don’t have much commercial on the South End so space is limited and rent is astronomical. Karla does okay, despite the overhead. She has a couple of stylists who rent chairs, Billie and Veronica, neither from around here, which keeps the gossip almost under control.

Veronica kept saying Camahno for Camano the first year, but tomahto, potahto, who cares? One of the recent candidates for Island County Commissioner pronounced it Camahno too. Who knows, maybe Veronica styled his hair? Actually we do know cause he said he’d never been here before. It’s an odd name for an odd island. Billie called it Commando Island and still does.

Karla figured she’d get to experiment a bit on styling, become the tonsorial artiste she’d dreamed of being. Course, mostly she does perms and blue hair touch up for our more geriatric crowd. It pays the rent, but she would be the first to tell you it doesn’t exactly set her soul free, but hey! life isn’t a chick flick.

Veronica plans to move on soon, so she says. Set up a salon herself closer to Seattle and Gomorrah, maybe draw a hipper, younger clientele than here. Course, the competition is worse, rents are even higher and there’s that whole nuisance of accounting, advertising, payroll and hiring, stuff that sort of ruins capitalism for her. Me too, if you want to know….

Billie’s my stylist … although maybe that’s not the most accurate description. I get a Lop Job about once every 9 or 12months, depending on my need to look halfway respectable at finalist art presentations, what you might call job interviews. The rest of the time I wear hats in various stages of decomposition. Hair style is pretty much moot. I know Billie’s been at the Kut Above a long time because she’s cut my hair 3 or 4 times. Might explain why she never remembers me. Well … at least until I put the hat on over her tonsorial artistry. Also explains why I always leave a generous tip.

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Sorry to leave you all in the lurch  …   but, I have relatives visiting and we’re going to make a quick exodus to the coast.  I know what you’re  thinking — we’re running from Ebola.  Truth is, we’re running from the media coverage of Ebola.  It’s time to take a Time Out.  Isis, Ebola, Al Qaida, the Ukraine, Gaza,  the midterm elections, pick a hot topic.  I’m sick of it all.  Gonna go out to the ocean and see what the winds and the tide have to say….  Probably nothing, probably everything we might consider profound.  I promise I won’t come back in a few days with seashell philosophizing.  I’m not looking for answers, just cosmic riddles.   Like Bubbhism sez, for those who ask no questions, there are no mysteries….

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WELCOME TO RUBY’S !!
You are staying in the fabulous 1940’s house of Ruby Reed, burlesque queen of Camano’s roaring south end, Her mother, mary mayers, owned the house just to the south of here you can see across the garden next door and sold ruby and her husband the land this house is built on for ten dollars in 1944.
We bought mary’s house in 1977 and in the course of remodeling it we found a full size theater poster of a rather risque woman behind the walls. RuthLathrop, our neighbor at the time who lived in this house, said it must be ruby. “I told you she was a dancer.”
“A dancer?” we asked. “This is a stripper!” “Well,” Ruth laughed, “she was a burlesque dancer.”
History sometimes comes back to haunt us in unpredictable ways. Ruby lived in both her mom’s house and later this house. We know she danced burlesque in seattle and we know a bevy of dancers partied hearty here on the south end. Later ruby taught ballroom dancing and tap dancing in Stanwood.
What we don’t know for sure is if the theater poster is really ruby. I think it is. My historian wife needs more provenance. You can make up your own minds, of course, but meanwhile enjoy a small mystery of history. If you hear tapping in the night, it’s just ruby working out one of her routines. You’ll get used to it ….

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So we decided to buy the land next door that came up for sale 25 years after it last went on the market. Back then we lived in our shack a few hundred feet away, but there was No Way we could’ve afforded it, no lost sleep over that then. This time we’ve been through a quarter century of rental neighbors. We’ve had school ma’arms and deadbeats, milkmen and veterinarian assistants, Navy guys and glassblowers, couples with kids, men with dogs, folks with breeding cats, people we never set eyes on for years and people we wish we hadn’t seen at all, one that died, one that lived in the house with curtains drawn without power or heat for a month who I figured had moved until the day he stood at the power box beating on it insanely with a hammer, I guess to see if electricity might return.

Probably the lowest rent on the island, this little house. There’s a converted chicken shed a mile north that rents for $250 a month more than this place next door. So we’ve had a parade of short term neighbors, pretty much not interested in the neighborhood or us, just folks hoping to move UP in life. Meaning, a job closer to town. Someday they’ll regale their grandkids with tales of killer nettles and night crawling blackberries, 5 day power outages and artist neighbors while the kids listen in wide-eyed, open mouthed horror.

So we took a long deep inhalation … and bought the place. I guess so we could NOT have neighbors up there. Sure, we could rent the place, AirB&B it, but that sort of defeats our logic. Nothing new there, but lately it’s been quiet here. Peaceful. Hell, almost pastoral. I’d like to say you can’t put a price on that. But believe me, I can. Right down to the nickel.

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