No names. No pictures.

I have a dark secret I’ve harbored for almost the entire 16 years I lived at the Bar B. Filled with shame and fear, something that used to keep me awake at night when dread came stalking in the middle of the night.

Lordy. Here we go.

When I first bought the house the floors were bare plywood. It smelled like 12 German Shepards lived in there because they did and it took 3 5-gallon buckets of white-color Kilz to get the smell outta there. Painted plywood is still painted plywood.

I had a friend who we’ll call, Martha.

Martha was used to the finest things in life. Beautiful home with expensive artwork and delicate figures and Victorian furniture. The room that held those treasures was cordoned off to ensure no animal, child or clumsy visitor would interrupt the chi of history.

Every house Martha lived in was painted the same creamsicle orange color. Every wall.

The bedroom was decorated in 60s style bedspread with pillow shams, small accent pillows and an antique doll. The hanger bar in the closet struggled under the weight of Martha’s business suits, shoes, matching purses and probably an assortment of dickies. Her wedding dress was in there somewhere under all those hat and shoe boxes. If you’ve seen a bedroom like that, you know.

Martha’s career had a linear progression. Always a direct line of jobs that utilized her skills. One of them involved a suite of tastefully decorated offices.

There was this one rug. An 9×12, $10,000, mint-green, hand-woven rug with fringe. Its flowers were delicate and subtle. The kind of rug that when it’s walked on, it moved under your feet. Plush and elegant, it embraced your feet. Barefoot? It caressed your toes that oozed luxury and the aura of money. It even had a special comb that in between appointments, she would kneel down in her Chanel, Prada or Saint Laurent suit and brush the fringe to line it up just so.

Martha decided it was intolerable that my house, with it’s missing walls, 70s foil-accented wallpaper, exposed Tyvek would have painted floors. Martha brought up the rug and a runner that was probably the length of a broad-jumper track. She brought it up unbidden. I did NOT ask for it. I did NOT EVEN think about asking for it. I didn’t even know it existed.

I didn’t want it. I didn’t like it. But into the house it came. Jack and Nina loved it. Their stories began in the carpeted hallways of Cove Creek. Plywood offended their delicate paws.

I was paranoid about the because Martha had one peculiar trait. Money. People who have money have it because they don’t give it away or fail to recall debts when owed or demand restitution for wrongs perceived or otherwise. I’d seen her lose friends because they lost something of hers and she wasn’t happy with an offering of peace or a heart-felt apology. One of her precious casserole dishes was sent home with a friend containing bountiful Thanksgiving leftovers. The casserole that dated back to the times of wearing pearls to vacuum and being measured for the truest height custom-ironing board. That friendship ended. Well, it didn’t just end, it had a life of it’s own in the halls and rooms at work, the dining room, the restaurant. The story of betrayal was shared far and wide and the stories became the stuff of legends.

Now, I’m taking the long-way ’round with this story. You had to understand the history, feel it, see life from Martha’s point of view. Money, money, money.

Jack didn’t really care about Martha’s views on compensation and retaliation. He puked on the upper right-hand corner just the same. It was the kind of yellow, cat vomit that laughs at any attempts to clean it up. I tried my best. I gently wiped up the puke, wet a sponge and dabbed at the stain. The stain itself began to grow. The mint-green color began to fade. The more I worked on it, the larger the yellow cat-vomit stain became. I delicately applied a toothbrush with a literal drop of Dawn and used painter strokes of Van Gogh to caress each stained strand to no avail. In desperation I took it outside, draped it over the porch railing and turned the hose on the area. The rug was now what Harrison Ford’s character in ‘American Graffiti’ called a combination of “Piss yellow and puke green.”

I left it to dry thinking hey, the color might come back.

It didn’t.

I left it outside overnight and hadn’t counted on the rainstorm. Dripping wet, it’s sad fringe hanging there listlessly, frayed and tangled in the Colorado morning sun.

I went back in my house, closed the door, the curtains and didn’t look at it for two days.

By that time it was dry. There was only one thing to do – roll it up and stick it in the shed. I devised a system to hang it carefully from the rafters. I shut the shed doors.

As Martha got older, her sense of direction got worse. Twice she tried to come up to my house. I resigned myself to my fate. She never arrived and would text me two hours later that ‘something had come up.’ Martha never saw the house again.

My tree guy was working in the back yard a few months later and mentioned that I had a real mouse problem. I asked why he thought that. He said there were masses of little mouse-nests behind the shed and it looked like they’d gotten a hold of an old fashioned broom to feather their nests.

I panicked and opened the shed doors. Sure as shootin’ the damn mice had walked along the suspended rug and nibbled off the precious fringe in a perfectly straight line. I closed the she door. What could I do? The thought would wake me in the dark of the night and I’d ponder my fate. I didn’t want to lose a friend or $10,000.

For years I’d awaken suddenly and think about the rug and Martha’s reaction to it. Years. At one point she decided to move to a warmer climate and I held my breath but there was never a mention of the rug.

She had a garage sale to get rid of her massive amount of possessions. Truth is she didn’t sell a lot. She was asking big prices for little knick knacks. A garage sale is to get rid of stuff. Practically giving it away. No, Martha was going to make a buck. She asked friends to help out, promised us all a great lunch and lots of people signed up for ‘shifts.’ I got the last shift on Sunday afternoon. I didn’t get lunch. I got some leftover cucmber-tomato salad with no dressing.

Around 2 pm, Martha decides the sale is over. 60 percent of what she had went (and not without a fight) but the 40 percent that remained sat there on the sunny driveway. Martha told me to get my car and back it onto the driveway. OK. She started loading stuff into the back of my Subaru. Then directed me to load more into my Subaru. This wasn’t part of the deal. She retired to her well-shaded folding chair and pointed at what could go in the trash or my car. I’m angry at this point. All the stuff in the back of my car, she told me if there was anything I wanted, she would sell it to me at half price. My ass, I thought.

She took down the umbrella and her table complete with metal money box and said ‘thanks’ and waved goodbye. The garage door came down and that was that.

I took the load to Goodwill and they took it all but not until I picked out some things I wanted. There wasn’t much. It took almost a half hour to untangle the Jenga that was Martha’s life, sadly tossed into the back my car, the front seat, and I’ll give her credit for trying to put stuff on the top of my car but she was only 5′ tall.

A month later, she moved away, really without even a goodbye. She just left.

Martha left us for good last year.

My sadness at her passing is still with me. I miss pie Wednesdays. I miss her Big-Ass-BBQ every year where friends would gather and feast. And laugh. Kvetch. Share stories and just generally catch-up. The BEST stories were of Martha and her brothers. The three of them had stories that intertwined. Some pretty wild tales and funny as hell. Like funny as in you-can’t-make-this-shit-up funny.

I’m ashamed I was relieved that the rug wasn’t going to be an issue.

For more than 15 years that rug hung sadly from its little perch. It scared me to touch it, look at, anything to do with it. I was leery when I opened the shed door in case something lunged at me as if the rug was precious territory. No doubt double-digit generations of mice were produced from that fringe. No doubt the plush pile kept mousey families warm during rough winters.

I had toyed with the idea of donating it to a company that does rug restoration. Move it onto its next existence in an elegant living room. Maybe now in a lovely shade of hunter green. Yah, that didn’t happen.

Today, the final clean-up of the house is finished. There’s the first things you move, then there’s the last things you pay someone else to move. Everything has a hierarchy of importance. The shed was the last and I had to pay someone to finish all the tasks that were left.

Today, I saw motion on my Ring camera as the handyman carried the rug out effortlessly and tossed it into the back of a truck bound for the dump. Later, I asked him if there was anything in the rug and he said no, it was just a rug. He then moved onto the next task.

The saga is over and Martha, I’m sorry. Next life-time, remember, things are just things. The real loss here is you, not the stupid rug.

I miss you.