Just Deserts

It was the Thanksgiving season of 2013.

I, being five months pregnant, had foolishly volunteered to host for my immediate family. Not only was I victim to pregnancy fog, but our living conditions left much to be desired.

To provide context, we (my ex-partner, his daughter, me and my daughter) had only been living in our 800 sq. ft., 2-bedroom, main floor apartment for a little over two months. The triplex also had an apartment above us, a basement apartment below us the landlord used for "storage", and a utility room that housed all three furnaces and water heaters, as well as a coin-operated washer and dryer.

For the purpose of this story, it is important to note that although our lease stated we had access, we were never given a key and the landlord was highly averse to us entering the utility room.

In the little time we had lived there, the problems were already apparent. Our first full heat bill was over $600, the landlord was in and out of his mysterious basement, making ungodly noises at all hours of the night, and not even a week prior to Thanksgiving the main drainage pipe had clogged due to the upstairs neighbor flushing feminine hygiene products.

In this particular incident, it took two full days to locate the landlord. Two full days of not being able to cleanse ourselves or our children. Two full days of not being able to flush the toilet and having to dispose of our toilet paper in the trash. Two full days of having to disconnect the kitchen sink to allow our used dish water to drain into a 5-gallon bucket below and then be dumped outside. Finally, after the landlord was accounted for, he was able to unclog the drain and accuse me (a pregnant female) of flushing tampons down the toilet just in time for the next event that unfolded on Thanksgiving Day.

The morning of Thanksgiving Day, I woke up early to start preparations. The turkey was thawed and ready to be dressed. I made a homemade apple stuffing, removed the giblet bag, and filled its crevice. The turkey was ready to be basted and seasoned with homemade applesauce and various spices, but first I needed to wash my hands again.

Except when I went to go wash them, the water was no longer working.

The temperature outside was so low that somewhere between starting the preparations and then the pipes had froze in the basement, causing both inhabited apartments to be waterless.

Both the upstairs tenant and ourselves frantically tried to reach the landlord to no avail.

My ex-partner took an emergency trip to the convenience store to get jugs of water that we boiled on the stove so we could wash our hands (guests included), wash the pile of dishes, and to flush the toilet.

During all this chaos I had managed to accidentally get my apple baste on the turkey's pop-up timer, lost track of time, and served the driest, most over cooked turkey in the entire history of turkeys. The sides were impeccable and as you can imagine, the clean-up was miserable. After everything was said and done, I cried myself to sleep, still not having been able to contact our landlord and still without running water.

Not all the negligence and misery caused by our landlord was in vain though. Shortly after not having working water lines on and off, I filed a court case in rent escrow. After another incident on my birthday in March, where the ice dams on the roof melted and caused a waterfall along the support beams and flooded our apartment, the courts ordered a home inspection, including the elusive basement.

The courts found there was duct work haphazardly cut out from the main floor's unit as to heat the basement (hence our atrocious heat bills), the landlord's solution to the freezing pipes was to wrap the main connecting joint with a T-shirt, and various other code violations.

The courts ruled in our favor in June of 2014, resulting in us being awarded the entire six months of escrow, the landlord being fined, and the property to eventually be condemned.

Looking back, not only was a dried out, failed turkey served that Thanksgiving Day, but it also led to justice being served. Making it an all and all a good Thanksgiving.