Our Living Conditions, Part 6

Sorry about the delay. I will continue my story about my experience with United Order…

So for most of the years that Martha and I spent in the United Order, we shared a small single-wide trailer with my older brother and his wife. It was mostly alright, but it can be a little trying to share a home with someone else.

For instance, Martha’s cleaning standards were not up to my sister-in-law Sarine’s standards. I now believe that Sarine was obsessive-compulsive. When Martha would clean, Sarine would go behind it and re-clean everything, and then complain to her husband that Martha was not cleaning things well enough. This was the cause of a few arguments that I can think of. But Sarine was so demanding that Martha and I wound up spending most of our free-time away from home.

Martha’s parents had just moved to Arizona to join up with us, and we wound up spending the night on their living room floor as often as we could. Anything to be away from Sarine. Now, in saying this, I should say that Sarine could complain about a lot of things about Martha and I; I’m sure that we were not the best of roommates, either. But it got so bad that we spent most of our time at my in-laws.

After several days of sleeping on the floor at my in-laws, we returned home to find that our bedroom was covered with a layer of mold spores. Sarine, in her neurotic behavior, thought that there was not enough moisture in the house. So while we were gone, she kept a big pot of water on the stove, boiling constantly.

While we lived there, I had an ongoing and silent fight with Sarine. She kept the water going constantly. I thought it was a waste of propane and water. When I would walk by in the kitchen, I would switch off the water. She would walk by and switch it back on.

With us gone, Sarine and the boiling water won out, and we came home to find our room – our blankets, the walls, the closet - covered with mold. We tried to sleep there, but it was too bad. Little Sophie started to get sick.

So we moved back out into the living room of Martha’s parents.

Martha’s family originally had planned on moving out to the “Land”. They financed an old 1973 doublewide and moved it out onto our property. But when they got out to Arizona, the no-electricity thing was too much for them. So they rented a house in town. As a result, the double-wide sat on our property – the two halves exposed to the weather – for over a year.

After the whole mold incident, my father-in-law decided to give us the trailer. We just needed to pay off the loan. The first step was to get an appraiser to look at the trailer. It was so old and in such bad condition that it appraised at “zero”.

Nevertheless, we were gleeful to have a place of our own. We paid off the loan, hired a crew to set up the trailer and, in 1999, we moved in. Our whole married life, Martha and I had never unpacked. We had kept most of our belongings in boxes in storage units. I can’t tell you what a feeling it was to unpack for the first time, to have a room just for the kids.

The trailer was a piece of crap. But I loved it, because it was mine. And I shared it with no one. For a couple of weeks, anyway…

A polygamist man I knew had a young wife that needed a place to stay. So we moved some mattresses into our living room (that had no furniture anyway) and that’s where our kids slept. The young plural wife moved into the spare bedroom, and we got to listen to them giggling and tickling each other every other night. I was promised rent that I never got.

In June, 1999, a young lady named Temple decided to live with us for a couple of weeks to see if she was interested in “coming into my family”, as we say. The mattress on the floor in the living room became hers while she stayed there.

While there, she got to experience the whole family meeting together and eating together at my parents’ house.

A few months later, Temple married me and moved in permanently. Between the time she visited me and the time she married me, there had been a schism in our United Order. The after-dinner dishes became an issue. Typically, since we were eating at my mother’s house, all of the ladies (on a rare occasion the men) would pitch in to clean up and wash the dishes.

But on quite often, there were some of the moms who would feed their kids and then clear out without lifting a finger to help with the after-dinner chores. (Guess who?) So my mother got upset and prevailed on my dad to change it so that every family ate dinner at their own house.

I disagreed with the decision. But the complaints of the women won out, and by the time Temple joined the family, we were eating separately. We still traded “cooking days” – that is, we still rotated a cooking schedule where dinner was cooked for everyone. But now, it was distributed like some “Meals-on-Wheels” program and everyone ate at their own home.

Temple observed what I feared. She told me, “You were more united when you were all eating together. I could sense it. Now I sense that you are all less close.”

That was the decline of our United Order. I will explain more in the next post…