A Ferrerman Mystery

 The younger Gilmore Girl (I'll call her, Rory) rang my doorbell. I'm like a dog with doorbells. They freak me out. I don't bark, but I run around the house looking for my pants because I know, it's probably someone I need to wear pants for. And, of the 100 or so ring tone options on the doorbell, it somehow settled on a very loud, up tempo Jewish tone. Not Hava Nagila. Something snappier. I fucking hate it, but I probably hate them all. Nobody drops in on me except the Gilmore girls, so I guess I got the wireless doorbell for them. 

Rory was distressed. Near tears. She began apologizing, not for the intrusion, but for the reason for her ringing. She feared she might have bedbugs and that I might too and that it might be their fault. Rory invited me down to scope out the evidence. 

Her and her mom had done their homework on google before consulting me, and it was an either-or proposition of evidence. On her mom's bed, there were black dots that could well be bedbug poop, but also simply be signs of mold or mildew. Rory conducted an internet test. Wet a Q-tip with water and rub it on the black spots. If it smears them, it's bedbug poop. If not, most likely mold mildew. I considered this good news when it didn't smear as there was very little of it, only on Lorelie's bed, which was against a wall, not allowing for good ventilation. A little bit of bleach and a monitoring of the situation would solve this dilemma. But folks, this was not the Ferrerman mystery! 

Shortly before I move in here, before I got wheels, I was walking back from the store when I noticed two windows on the outside of my apartment, that I did not have inside my apartment! How the F does that happen? Well, this is in my back bedroom, and I ferrerly surmised that, once upon a time in the conversion of this single-family home to three rental units, someone had sheetrocked over the windows to make a closet. People do shit like that. By code, for a bedroom to be a bedroom, it has to have a closet. Alright. I felt a little cheated because, for ventilation purposes, it'd be nice to have those two windows. I had thought of doing some exploratory surgery on the wall to access the windows, but as a renter, I really shouldn't be doing shit like that. Though I can fix stuff like that, that I break, it wasn't really that important to me. Curious as I had been, I thought that case was closed. That is when I discovered "The Secret Staircase to Ferrerman's Apartment!"

Right off The Gilmore Girl's living room, I noticed a narrow set of stairs leading up to MY second-floor domain! It was quite the WTF moment! From the foot of the stairs, I could see the two mystery windows! I went up the stairs and saw a small mattress on the floor and general stuff, in a fairly large, loft-like area. This was behind my closet as I had figured, but by several more feet than I had imagined! It was probably original to the house. Old houses often have a second set of stairs. My mom's old house did, and we euphemistically called it "the maid's staircase" like it would be stairs used by a servant to access the kitchen whilst not bothering the fancy folk that might be in the parlor. It seemed redundant to me, but my nieces and nephews loved to chase each other up and down both sets of stairs when they were kids. Something happens to moms when they turn into grandmas. We were never little kids in that house, but had we been, we'd never be allowed to run up and down stairs like wild Indians! But grandchildren could! We weren't allowed to juggle knives, but there mom was handing out knives to visiting grandkids and telling them to learn to juggle! Go and figure!

I took some photos outside to better orient myself here. I discovered I was reading this house all wrong as I viewed it from up here in the living room where I do what passes for *work* these days. To leave that 'loft space' up here whenever this home was modified, would have created an odd, windowed space up here behind the second bedroom closet, that would just be awkward for any future renter. In fact, knowing what I know now, I think there is another similar space to my right, adjacent to the loft. Someone years ago, must have made the command decision to wall that off and forget about it. I get that. That happens in a lot of old houses where they close off spaces they don't want to heat and cool. I'm pleased they didn't rock over windows like I thought at first, because that's just weird. 

So, mystery solved and I was downright giddy to piece it together. If not for the bedbug scare, I might never have known.