America, are you laughing?

So in November of 2024 I was supposed to begin a house-sitting gig. I was supposed to house-sit for a friend’s neighbors, and their aging orange cat. The cat was 17 years old, and a bag of skin and bones - I was surprised that this cat was still breathing and had the capacity to put air in its lungs. Everytime the cat would take an inhale, its entire body would inflate like a balloon. 

These neighbors were sun-birds who were going to Baja California for the winter to get out of the rain and do some business. They run a kayak-building business and had some work lined up for their trip. A two for one - a trip and a vacation.  It seemed like a good idea to house-sit for them - at the time they appeared nice enough. The house seemed like a cozy place to spend a cold and rainy Portland winter. Their living room was spacious enough and it was located right next to a local pub. The owner of the business, Brian, even let me know that the house had once been a “punk heroin house” - alluding to a different Portland, a less tech oriented Portland, a less tech oriented PNW. Brian was referring to a Portland that once was - a PNW that once was. Portland where people are kind to each-other, and take care of each-other and the environment. A Portland where life is more relaxed. The Portland of the nineties. The bricks of the house had character.

So after we chatted, I ran around the block a few times and thought it over. It seemed like a great idea. We made a formal agreement over text that I would house-sit for them. Soon I was making plans to move out of the house I had lived in for over a year, I notified my “property management company” (I guess we live in an age where Portland has transcended landlords) - more than 30 days before my move out date and started preparing to “make moves”. I set up a time with this pair to move my possessions into their house, which included a full sized upright piano. The piano was the challenging part to move - pianos are, by nature, challenging instruments to move that require finesse, strength, and delicacy to lift. 

Soon moving day came, and it was the same day as Halloween. For all of October I packed up box after box, walking over wet leaves. The piano was moved into their house a week before Halloween, and I had created a little altar on top of it with plants and pottery. It was my little music altar, my sacred piano space.

I somehow managed to move all of my things out of the old house, into the new house, and clean the new house up completely. I was racing against the clock to get my security deposit back, it was down to the minute that I was scrubbing floors and battling cobwebs in the basement. Appropriate and spooky enough, I guess, for All Hallow’s Eve. As I was moving my things out, the owner of the kayak building business, was working on his navy blue jeep. This jeep is what you would call a “vintage” vehicle - it’s one of those cars that could be someone’s prized possession in a car show, what someone might deem a “collectible”. I don’t know how intelligent it is to place the fate of your business on the wheels of a car that old, but everyone has a different way of dealing with the gods and the cards that are handed to them. “Hey Lizzie”.....so, this piece of crap Jeep has been malfunctioning on me, Brian said to me, with his hands full of motor oil. He looked stressed out, like he was completely in over his head looking at the complexities going on inside of the engine. “It’s going to be a few more days before we leave on our trip to Baja…sorry about that. Do you mind if we put you up in the airbnb while I get this thing running again?”

Seeing that Brian looked completely in over his head, I replied “Sure Brian, not a problem”. So I grabbed my essentials from the stuff I had stored in the basement, and I walked up to the airbnb. I kept waiting to hear the engine of the Jeep start, but the engine wouldn’t get running, and it started to seem like a hopeless case. 

The real spooky stuff began happening after October 31. I guess there was a delayed schedule for “trick or treating” here. 

Every day that the Jeep’s engine refused to start was one day closer to the results of the 2025 presidential election. Who would be the next president of the USA? Would “WE THE PEOPLE” be subject to another term of presidency with a president whose campaign legitimacy was in question? Or would “WE THE PEOPLE” be subject to a president whose presidential campaign included “Meghan Thee Stallion”? This presidential election just seemed like a lightsaber battle between two preschool aged children to me. I distanced myself from the election. That evening, I watched the results of the election on a screen with friends at a bar, and we all groaned in unison as the results began to pour in. “We’re fucked”, I turned to my boyfriend at the time and said, we are totally fucked.

Trick or treat.

I woke up the next morning to a panicked text from Brian that had been sent to me at 6 in the morning. ‘Lizzie - you absolutely cannot house-sit for us. The reason that you are the way you are is because you grew up in a household with narcissistic parents. You are wounded. You cannot house-sit for us, we don’t like you”. And then Brian continued to list a list of reasons to me, via text, why he and his partner Liz did not like me and why they felt like I was unqualified to cat-sit for their 18 year old cat. They included everything from the way I was raised and alluded as well to the place that I grew up. I felt humiliated and demeaned. They also included the fact that I had accidentally called “Baja California”, “California” while chatting with them. It felt like they were laughing to each-other as they wrote that text. Like this was just some joke to them. I had just spent two weeks moving all of my stuff into their house, with their express permission. I texted Brian back - “Brian, you can’t be serious.” “Oh Lizzie, I am serious. You should have signed a formal contract with us”. In the first text that Brian sent me he told me that he and his partner Liz were generously giving me 3 days to get out of their house.

I was humiliated. I didn’t know at all what to do - I had trusted these people with my time, my effort, and every possession that I had to my name. Now all of my stuff was in their house - my clothing, my books, my four pairs of shoes - and most importantly, my piano. The piano that I had rescued with one of my closest friends. The piano I was going to play during the winter-time.

I looked up from my cell-phone at the dreary skies. A simple text had turned my life upside down. Was Brian actually serious? Was he actually doing this to me? All of my things were inside of their home. The temperatures were dropping daily and it was getting colder each day. My gut instinct was to humbly ask Brian and Liz for a month to figure things out - they refused.

In this situation, there were no laws protecting me in this situation from their malicious behavior. Why did this happen? I don’t know. I was okay because I was able to call upon the help of friends - but what if this had happened to someone that wasn’t me? What if they had decided to pull the rug out unexpectedly from underneath someone that…wouldn’t be as okay? My piano ended up on their front porch that winter, and left out exposed to the cold and the rain, like the musical body that it was - it had no chance against the elements. It’s legs became weak. They had moved it outside of their house and then left for Baja, and the lovely piano that had been gifted to me just ended up incurring water damage and the wood began rotting. A beautiful instrument - ruined. That piano was someone’s mother’s piano, and it was entrusted to me as a gift. Now what? It was just wreckage. Just something that the sinkhole of capitalism had swallowed whole.

After six months, I still don’t know what to make of Brian and Liz’s behavior. It was immature at best - and it was corrupt and malicious at worst. Were these two “proud liberals” and “upstanding citizens”  simply over-reacting to the unsettling results of the presidential race? Was their reaction to behave like two guys drinking beer at a ball game series who had just witnessed the team they were rooting for lose? Was their reaction simply immaturity to the presidential game, or is it a sign of something deeper, sicker, and more malicious? 

I still live in the same neighborhood as this pair. Sometimes a thought crosses my mind - am I even safe to walk around their neighborhood six months later? I don’t know. I don’t feel totally safe. It makes me question a lot. The only way I can come to terms with the terrifying results of November’s spooktacular moments is to know that if they had treated someone with less social cushioning and community support this way- that this person would have been really severely damaged. It’s really logical and elementary - promising an individual housing in the wintertime - anywhere where it has the potential to get below freezing, or rains a lot, or snows - has consequences for that individual. That is putting the life of that person in danger. I grew up in a very cold part of the Midwest, and as a child when I would take the long train ride into the city, I would see the bodies of homeless individuals curled up on the sidewalk. My parents would hustle me past their stiff bodies, in an attempt to protect me from a truth I would have to come to terms with as a young adult. One day as a teenager I realized that not every person that I would pass in the wintertime would make it through the winter. That is the unsettling truth of houselessness in America. Not everyone survives. 

Houselessness is a battle against all odds - it is a battle that includes the unpredictability of the elements and includes the fates. In my America no one deserves to freeze to death or be forced into living outside during 6 months of rain. In my America everyone has a safe place to live. In my America, every person deserves to have a roof over their head.  However..I don’t live in “My America” - I live in our America.  An America we are creating with our actions, our thoughts, and our words. I think as US citizens we have to ask the pragmatic question - do we truly live in an America where there are people who fall asleep in warm beds and lay their heads on pillows, and still ask the question of each-other - does everyone deserve to be fed? Does everyone deserve to be housed? I will leave you, the reader, to ponder the ethics at play here. My name is Lizzie and this is my story.