Beware the Ides of March

I’ve always been apprehensive on March 15. Today gave good reason to continue that sensibility. Landlord comes on property to play with his pool pump still. He persists in stating that “someone” broke it. Yet, after looking him in the eyes, standing my ground, averring that no one, neither me, husband or our pool man did so, he finally admitted, “Well, come to think of it, a man I had here five or six years ago broke a piece off.” In utter disbelief and disgust, not just at hearing another lie but in that he wholeheartedly committed himself to that lie for years, I proceeded to close the door. He then took his whole body and forcibly barreled through the front door, bending the metal closure on the door frame, and his force had the door send me sailing backward into a stack of boxes. After recovering myself, I went to the telephone to call the police. Landlord taunted me, “Call the police, go ahead. This is my property.” We had been subject to landlord’s bad temper for years, which culminated in this incident, documented as police report of battery against tenant.

December 7 — A date which will live in infamy

December 4, 2011: Landlord proffers a lease renewal at the end of the current lease arrangement of January 31, 2013. Tenant and her daughters are relieved and plan to put up a Christmas tree after all.

December 7, 2011: Landlord launches a sneak attack, and we are barraged with harassing telephone messages and bombed with threatening emails, rescinding lease renewal. Landlord’s axis of evil recruits current live-in woman as double-agent to provoke and agitate.

Amid confusion, tenant’s husband aka daughters’ father, goes AWOL in cowardly retreat, leaving mother to assess damage, quell internal upheaval, attend to casualties, including, but not limited to, youngest daughter breaking into hives from emotional and cardiac distress.