Dear World: I Don't Know How to Pay This Bill
You seriously want me to write you a check???
I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.
Everyone here eats scrapple.
It’s a breakfast item on every diner menu—which is a weird thing to say, because I don’t usually go to diners (unless I’m in New Jersey; people from New Jersey are freak shows), but everything here is a diner. There are truck stop diners, luncheonette diners, mom and pop diners, and country-cookin’ diners that look like something out of the deep south: porches with old rocking chairs, creaky wooden floor boards, 50s retro table sets—complete with orange formica & metal edges—and at least four middle-aged racists.
Wikipedia describes scrapple as “American pork offal mush,” which definitely should be the name of someone’s band (or my new food blog). Imagine if meatloaf had a cousin, but that cousin was extra murderous. Instead of ground beef, we’re grinding up a hog’s head, its heart, its liver, and probably some pinky. Then we add a touch of cornmeal and flour, hoping like hell there isn’t a hole in the bag. Finally, we smash it all together and pop it into a loaf pan. Once it’s set into meat jello, we slice ‘er up and fry individual pieces in oil, served with a squirt of ketchup. Ketchup is so fucking American, isn’t it?
At the diner where I’ve been meeting the girls every week, scrapple costs $3.99 for two slices of this hot-dog like daydream. For context, an order of toast only costs $1.50. A bagel is $1.75. Homefries are $2.29. I’m pretty sure I could buy the entire building for less than a subscription to Disney+.
Scrapple, thus, is the caviar of side orders. The only thing more expensive is bacon and chipped beef, because obviously those are varsity.
Behold:
The cost of living is one of the friendliest things about being here in rural America, though my electricity bill this month was not so friendly.
This month’s bill came in at $985.98. I blame this entirely on electric baseboard heaters and a fierce stubborn streak that prevents me from ever turning off the Christmas lights. The Christmas lights stayed on for one month straight, 24/7, despite the rational part of my brain telling me this was a fire hazard. Who cares about fire hazards when you have to make a slammin’ first impression on the neighbors? Not only did I keep the farmhouse Christmas tree lit up like Manhattan, but I also put one on the front porch of the cottage, just for some extra fuck-you.
(Though the real fuck-you was the one to my bank account. Remind me to celebrate Hanukkah next year instead.)
By the way, did you see the pictures I posted over on Instagram of the farmhouse?
You probably didn’t, because Instagram is kind of passé these days, isn’t it? I hadn’t posted anything since June, because that is what you do when you uproot your life and move to the countryside and buy a house and then busy yourself with sink traps and the perfect shade of blue and whether or not you are a complete and total lump because you have scratched the original, wide-plank hardwood floors AT LEAST three times.
So the other day I figured: maybe I should actually post a photo. A sign of life! A smoke signal to the world! And then it snowed, and I org*smed.
See that door? I took that door right off its hinges this fall, walked it out to the garage, plopped it on a set of sawhorses (EVERYONE NEEDS A SET OF SAWHORSES), sanded the bastard down, and then painted it a delicious shade of red. It’s this one, from Clare, and everytime I look at it I think, “now there’s something I didn’t screw up.”
The neighbor up the road, on the other hand, definitely screwed up. She, too, has a red door, but her red door is way too bright. Every time I drive by her house I feel secretly smug.
Now if only I could get it right on my lips.
Speaking of snow, here are some fun facts I recently learned:
In 6 inches of snow, you can tell if the deer tracks across your yard are a buck or a doe. A buck will drag its feet across it, whereas a doe will pick her feet up out of it. In six inches or more, they both drag their feet.
When going down hill, put your car in neutral. The wheels don’t keep trying to spin like they do in drive, and it slows you down without having to hard brake. (Farmer’s trick.)
If you salt your concrete driveway, it’ll eventually crack. Salt is very bad for concrete.
Everyone puts their windshield wipers up in the air when a storm is coming. I forgot that was a thing. But, as soon as I saw it happen, I was transported to the year 2001 when I was sixteen years old and knew everything about the world.
You should probably buy a snowblower, you fucking moron.
Went to the post office. Here, going to the post office is a major social event. It’s like the bar, for christians. As soon as I walked in, the two people waiting at the counter spun around 180 degrees on their heels and full-on greeted me. I’m not talking about a polite smile; I’m talking about a royal reception. “Hello, come on in, it’s cold out there!”
And I don’t even know them.
“How much are stamps these days?” the woman asks the cashier.
“Sixty-six cents,” he replies. “But they’re going up to sixty-eight cents on January 21st!”
She then turns around and talks it over with me and the guy in line. “Sixty-eight cents? You hear that? We’d better stock up!”
Needing stamps is a new thing for me. I find it equally fascinating and absurd. I haven’t needed a stamp since 1992. But here, if you don’t have a book of stamps you don’t have any leverage.
You know why?
Here, you need stamps…
…because here…
…you need to write…
checks.
Oh yes, checks. As in, the little bank slips from the 90s.
I cannot tell you how many people you need to write checks for: the landscaper wants a check. The electrician wants a check. The contractor wants a check. The township wants a check. I can’t wire money because a wire would require me to have someone’s bank account info, and people around here are suspicious of giving that out. I can’t Paypal anybody the money, because nobody uses Paypal. And I can’t Venmo the money, because nobody has Venmo.
And they certainly don’t have an electronic invoicing system.
The propane company actually hangs paper invoices on my door handle. The first time this happened, I had no idea what to do with it. There was no website. No log-in. No instructions. Nowhere telling me how or where I could pay. I scanned the front and back feeling like a helpless infant.
Finally called the company.
“Hi, I received this invoice from you, but I’m not sure how to get you any money.”
“Unfortunately there’s no way you can pay online,” the woman replied.
And then she just let the silence HANG.
So then I had to say more, which is always a bad idea.
“So, I need to come in person?”
“No,” she said as if I were slow. “You can just send us a check.”
Do you know how weird it is, ordering checks?
I called TD bank, which is my bank, which is all the way in Philadelphia, and they agreed with the lady at the propane company: I was a toe fungus.
I needed to go through another company—Harland Clarke—to order my checks. The only good thing about that is that Harland Clarke let me put an airplane icon on my checks. (It was between that and Mickey Mouse.)
So then I told everyone, with heightened enthusiasm, that I would have a check for them SOON. The checks were coming, the checks were coming! And then, the checks did not come. I waited for weeks for this box of checks. Checked the front door, checked the back door, checked the mailbox, checked the post office. (After a three-hour conversation about stamps.)
Finally, one day I was going through that pile of mail that you put your desk but procrastinate opening for a month, when I came upon an envelope. It was a flimsy envelope. Probably a bra catalogue. However, upon further inspection, I discovered something inside: there, in that wimpy envelope, were my checks.
This morning at the diner, I was going to order some American pork offal mush. Unfortunately, the wifi was out.
“We can only accept cash today,” the server told me.
“Do you take checks?”
“No,” she replied.
And then I walked into a pond.
I was ASTOUNDED when my local water company finally put a url on my bill to pay it online. This was after 20 years of mailing checks, a scene in my house that usually played out as, "Where is the checkbook?" "Do we still have a checkbook?" "No, you had it last." "Fine. I'll just start a new batch of checks." "Where's the box with the checks?" (Ours come in a box from Harland Clark. Fancy stuff.) "No, that's the box with the checks that are all used up." "I don't know why we're holding on to checks from 2003. Aren't we supposed to shred them or something?" "Where are the envelopes?" "Do we have any envelopes?" "Do we have any stamps?"
I'm convinced they made online payment an option solely because of me. I'd completely forget to pay the thing, like, for months. They only bill twice a year.
The other thing I find interesting is all of this probably means that kids there know how to write a check, which I think is awesome. My kids couldn't write a check if you told them it was the only way they could pay for a Magic The Gathering card they'd been staking out for over a year.
I bet kids there also know how to read and write in script.
I am LMAOOOOO at all of this! A lot of it simply does not compute for me and I'm Canadian...a place where we've always been significantly behind American in payment technology. We didn't have Visa logos on our debit cards for YEARS after you guys did and I know this because my ex-husband is American. I've had the same check book for like 18 years. Even our landlords here take e-transfers.
One thing we are significantly ahead of you on is salt and concrete. We must have specialty concrete because we salt it for 8 months a year and none of it has disappeared into a decaying sinkhole yet.
Loved reading this Ash. And your house is friggin beautiful. Everything about it, including the snow.