A Home with Room to Rescue, and Then Some

When John and I bought our house and dog rescue property in NW IN, we bought it from an elderly couple named Lowell and Nancy who were in their early eighties, who were planning to move to Florida, to the Villages, to retire. We had been living in Chicago but wanted to start a dog rescue for herding breeds and we needed an acre. It was a lot less expensive to buy it across the border because property taxes in IL can be higher than the mortgage payment.

The house we found was conveniently near I-90 so we could get to Downtown Chicago in under an hour and it was an offbeat, charming colonial style, originally designed by John Lloyd Wright for the US Govt. It was part of a munitions plant that was here in Kingsbury IN that has serviced the military in WW2. We lived in what was known as the officers housing, and the houses were very well built and interesting. We inherited a lot of American history with the house, but what we didn’t realize was that we might also be inheriting other things as well.

Lowell was about eighty years old, over six feet tall and extraordinarily thin. He wore black spectacles and dyed his hair an improbable shade of Grecian Formula black. There was something still wonderfully active about him, particularly when he was prowling around his yard. And Lowell loved his lawn.

I don’t mean that he enjoyed having a nice lawn, I mean that Lowell appeared to have entered into a sacred covenant with grass. His yard was immaculate and every blade seemed to know where it belonged. The edges were perfect and weeds apparently understood that crossing the property line would have consequences. Lowell tended that lawn as though someday representatives from the International Lawn Committee might arrive without warning and deduct points for an improperly positioned blade of Kentucky bluegrass.

Then there was his wife Nancy, a petite but buxom Polish woman, also in her eighties, and she and Lowell had an interesting quality about them that John and I couldn’t quite put our fingers on when we first bought the place.

Then we discovered the jacuzzi.

It was a three-person jacuzzi and it was black with gold hardware.

Beside it was a statue of a naked woman glued to a glass shelf.

Not near the jacuzzi, not casually decorating the room. She was GLUED to the shelf beside the jacuzzi. Apparently Lowell and Nancy had wanted to take her with them to the Villages, but Naked Jacuzzi Lady had become structurally incorporated into the house. She was glued to the glass shelf and you couldn’t get her off of there without breaking the glass, so she stayed. She was about a foot tall, made of red painted shiny ceramic, and posed nude in the style of Marilyn Monroe, like in her early nude calendar days. You know, the famous calendar picture that MM said she had nothing on but the radio when the photo was taken.

John and I decided almost immediately that there were some questions about the previous occupants that we did not need answered. Then we began meeting the neighbors.

We had both grown up in Pennsylvania, and we lived in New York City, Los Angeles and then Chicago…. so we thought we were moving to a quaint rural town forty miles east of Downtown Chicago… a sort of “Green Acres”. But there was a peculiar sense, at least from our perspective, that some things were not as innocent as they first appeared. We were not expecting a Cinemax drama, afterall.

We unwittingly held a picnic after we moved in, to politely introduce ourselves to the neighborhood…. and some of the guests? Well let’s just say that they weren’t checking us out in the ordinary new-neighbor sense. Checking us out, maybe in a different way that you wouldn’t expect in a small farming community. John and I gradually began to wonder whether there had been a social scene that nobody had mentioned during the real-estate closing.

We weren’t interested. We were, and remain, spectacularly boring in this department. Give us some dogs, a garden, a movie and something good for dinner and we’re pretty much set.

After we bought the house Lowell and Nancy moved to The Villages and that should have been a tip off, but we still couldn’t wrap ourselves around a promiscuous country social circle with octogenarians, you know?

Later, after we’d lived there for awhile, we started to hear more stories that made us wonder whether our original suspicions had perhaps not been entirely ridiculous. And had some of the neighbors who were eying us up at the BBQ? They suddenly stopped talking to us. A little freaked out, I went on Facebook to track down Nancy and Lowell, and to my surprise I found that Nancy had created a Facebook page for herself, with a photo of her dressed provocatively in a black lace evening gown apparently inviting attention from gentlemen, or people…. like a precursor to “only fans” but for octogenarians. I had never encountered elderly people like this. Most of my old Polish relatives were happy to eat cabbage, fart and watch TV all night, maybe have a Pabst on the weekends. Whoop whoop!

So I closed Nancy’s Facebook page, and I never looked back, just not wanting to see any more. I considered my house and at that point I thought, Okay…. maybe Naked Jacuzzi Lady had stories and I was glad that John insisted on having a professional pool guy clean and service the jacuzzi after we moved in. I don’t know exactly what went on in this house before we bought it, and perhaps that is for the best. Lowell and Nancy’s private life was their business and now that they are both deceased it will forever remain their secret. Thank God.

But I can tell you what happened to Lowell’s lawn, we destroyed it. Not intentionally, our mission moving there was to open a Dog Rescue. We put up an inner fence, then came the rescue dogs. Over the years our yard became the domain of what is now the Robertson Rescue Pack. We have had dozens of rough and tough herding dogs playing, herding, frolicking, digging and doing all manner of things that I am sure Lowell wouldn't have wanted done in his pristine back yard.

The perfectly manicured lawn became a puppy playground. Dogs ran. Dogs chased balls. Dogs chased each other. They established preferred routes through the yard until certain patches of grass simply surrendered and the lawn developed dog highways. There were toys. There were barking emergencies. There were holes of uncertain origin. There were five or more dogs simultaneously announcing the arrival of a squirrel. The pampered lawn got a real workout.

Then we started gardening. Now tomatoes wander around trees, a cucamelon vine has attempted to annex part of the deck. The pumpkins are no longer in their patch and are currently trying to escape through the fence. Squash has occupied territory previously belonging to grass and John feeds the plants enthusiastically, which has resulted in vegetation apparently preparing to take over northern Indiana.

And through all of this, Naked Jacuzzi Lady remains, a silent witness to regime change.

Every summer for a few years before they passed away, Lowell and Nancy would return to the area to visit family and “friends”. And sometimes they would drive past the house. Slowly. Very slowly.

We would see them looking out their car window. We never spoke to them, so I can’t tell you what they were thinking, but I can imagine.

I picture Lowell staring through those black spectacles at his former lawn. The immaculate turf was gone. There was now a fenced in enormous doggy playpen inside the big fence so that we had a proper dog yard. Behind it, rescue dogs were screaming with excitement while somebody threw a tennis ball. We live in the county next to a horse farm so the dogs are legally allowed to bark to their heart’s content with no noise ordinance, and they do, joyfully.

The grass has been trampled into canine interstate highways. Vegetables climb trees and fences, and somewhere a pumpkin makes a break for freedom wherever there is an empty space.

As they drove by that last time, I imagine Nancy was looking toward the house. “I wonder is our naked lady still there?”

“Nancy.”

“What?”

“I am looking at my lawn.”

Poor Lowell, he created a beautiful lawn, but we created something entirely different. And here’s the funny thing, I think both of us loved this little piece of land, we simply had completely different ideas about what it was for.

Lowell loved it by controlling it - he trimmed it, groomed it and preserved it.

We loved it by using it - we filled it with rescued animals. We planted things, we grew food. We threw tennis balls and we sat outside with the dogs. We watched them run and we let the yard become messy and noisy and imperfect. We let it become alive.

Whoever owns this house after us may curse our names. They are going to have to aerate, seed, and fill many holes. They may stand in the middle of the backyard holding a bag of grass seed and wonder what kind of savages lived here before them. And somewhere in a pristine Florida cemetery, the spirit of Lowell’s idea of a perfect lawn will finally be vindicated.

But for now? It isn’t a show lawn or a perfect lawn. It isn’t even a particularly good lawn, it’s a dog lawn. Dozens of rescued dogs have spent years running across it with tennis balls in their mouths, digging up the dirt, and dragging big sticks across the grass, and that’s good enough for us.

Although every once in a while, when I see a dandelion growing proudly in the middle of the yard I sense a disturbance in the ethers…. maybe on a grass covered purgatorial plane of existence Lowell suddenly stops whatever he’s doing, his black spectacles slowly rise with his grizzled eyebrows.

“Nancy.”

“What?”

“Something has happened to the lawn.”

Nancy doesn’t even look up.

“Let it go, Lowell.”

“But—”

“LET. IT. GO.”

And back on Earth, in NW Indiana, rescue dogs thunder across what remains of the grass while Naked Jacuzzi Lady watches silently out the bathroom window.

She has seen things and she isn’t talking… and for that, we are glad.