When I last left off, I was experiencing a smorgasbord of weather variations in the vicinity of Dayton, Ohio while completing my final rotation of med school. Both my mom and Mark came up from their respective states of residence to visit me as Ohio, unlike California, is within a driving distance where one can both leave and arrive in the same calendar day.

My departing flight left Dayton at 06:30, which translated to reveille at approximately 04:30 once the usual allowances were made for driving time and airport security; accordingly, I went to bed early stayed up until 03:30 talking to Mark. An hour of sleep later, I stumbled into the waiting vehicle of my dear longsuffering mother, who had volunteered to drive me to the airport at this dreadful time of day. En route while looking up my flight information, I realized with a sinking feeling that my flight left not at 06:30, but 06:00, putting me thirty minutes behind. Not wanting to spread my sudden-onset globus hystericus affliction with Mom, I opted not to share this information. Instead I undoubtedly confused her by attempting to act as though my abrupt conversational shift to monosyllabic responses was entirely normal.

At this point a little additional background information is helpful because chances are you aren’t familiar with Dayton, Ohio. There is a nice airport that isn’t particularly busy because nobody “passes through” Dayton on the way to somewhere else. As a result the general air approach is to fly into one of the other Midwest hubs like St. Louis or Detroit and from there take a significantly smaller plane on a short hop to the final destination. I would imagine that people say there is traffic on the highways during rush hours, but with my relative scale calibrated to LA traffic, it’s a joke. Not to mention that at 04:30 there shouldn’t be too much happening on any roads, with some exceptions.

You can now imagine my surprise when traffic (mostly semi trucks) on I-75 ground to a halt. Not the slow, creeping, rush hour sort of jam, but the full stop, turn off the car and get out kind that happens when a tanker falls off a bridge in Baltimore or it rains anywhere in SoCal. We bailed off the highway and began navigating a series of surface streets to bypass the occlusion. It thus became especially relevant that my mother is a very, shall we say, careful driver, interpreting speed limits as actual maximums rather than loose guidelines while I practiced calm breathing through a rictus grin.

When we arrived at the airport, my fragile facade crumbled: the car had barely stopped moving before I was out of the car and unloading my suitcase. “Bye Mom, hugs and kisses, love you,” speed walk to the security line. All the smart med students paid for TSA PreCheck prior to starting interview season; I, on the other hand, did not. There were only three people ahead of me, though, which would have been fortunate had the first person not been subsequently joined by the other four members of their family. None of them had anything ready to go; and because this is Dayton, the friendly TSA agent helpfully walked them through what they needed to present and patiently waited while they fumbled for each new item. Here are the boarding passes! We need IDs too? Here you go. Wait, the kids need their boarding passes? I’m so sorry let me find them.

My plane has started boarding.

Finally they are able to get through the first checkpoint and into to the scanning area, but of course they have everything from car seats to breast milk to unload onto the belts for inspection. My turn, I went through, oh hey my carryon suitcase got flagged for further scrutiny; they had to throw away my double-edged safety razor blades, an item doubtlessly forbidden to foil would-be assailants who enjoy accidentally cutting themselves. I tried to walk quickly and calmly away from the area before taking off running to my gate, arriving out of breath at the empty waiting area as the attendant was closing the jet bridge door. She kindly let me through and I boarded the plane, making my walk of shame to the cheap seats in the very back only to discover that because this was a small plane, my bag wouldn’t fit in the overhead compartment. Cue a repeat walk to the front of the plane to gate-check it, avoiding eye contact with everyone during my return. I buckled my seatbelt and the plane immediately pulled away from the gate, at which point the perspiration caught up to my heart rate. When I finally stopped sweating, we were landing in Detroit.

Weather is the height of inoffensive topics, typically reserved for such situations as breaking ice, vainly attempting to prevent a relative from espousing their religiopolitical views in polite company, and  interactions that have reached a level of tedium where discussing the class of precipitation seems interesting. One could be forgiven for assuming that, if I am writing about atmospheric conditions in Dayton, Ohio, I must truly be scraping the bottom of the inspirational barrel. I have, however, spent the past week experiencing nearly  every form of wetness that is capable of falling from the sky, a rather foreign phenomenon for me after eight years in drought-ridden California.

Unlike my lovely spouse, I invariably overlook the forecast when checking the weather; consequently I was surprised when I awoke to about 4 cm of snow blanketing my car. Thankfully I had anticipated this by packing a scarf and gloves in addition to my winter coat, although my preparations unfortunately did not include an ice scraper. I bundled up, naïvely assuming that snow was going to be the precipitation du jour. By midday, however, it had changed over to a warm rain, and by the time I left work it was pleasantly clear.

Upon next waking it was raining heavily, the downpour leading to flood warnings via that system where everyone’s phone simultaneously produces a loud alert tone. By the time I went to sleep that night, the cloudburst had transformed into a thunderstorm, lightning periodically illuminating the room. On the following day, the rain had abated but the winds seemed to be picking up, and in fact that afternoon we were treated to another round of alerts, this time for tornadoes. A “Code Gray” was called in the hospital for inclement weather, which, in addition to securing the windows in patient rooms, apparently includes a protocol where someone announces said Code Gray over the hospital PA system approximately every two minutes until the all-clear is received.

We weren’t finished yet, though: the next several days casually alternated between snow flurries and rain, culminating in a ¿por qué no los dos?  sleet-storm that left me sitting in my car waiting for windshield ice to melt because I still don’t have a scraper. Perhaps by way of apology, this Friday was the most beautiful day since I’ve been here, a balmy 27 ºC that saw me visiting Riverscape MetroPark in Downtown Dayton. It’s been raining ever since.

Rachel and I have been looking for a new place to live because, well, the rent. One of the options we’ve been considering is finding a house and sharing it with our friend Liz and another guy, Matt, a friend of a friend who has been looking for a place as well. After months of disappointment Rachel finally found a house that looked like the right balance of bedrooms, bathrooms, and price, and made an appointment for us all to tour it this afternoon. Unbeknownst to us, things had already begun spiraling out of control.

We pile into our vehicles and show up at the house a few minutes before our appointment with the realtor. It is obvious from the movement and voices that people are inside, so we knock on the door. No answer. A dog begins to bark, drawing our attention to the “Beware of Dog” sign hung on the gate. Footsteps thunder around the house. We wait a little while and knock again – still no answer. We begin getting the sense that we’re actively being ignored by the house occupants, but shrug it off and poke around the driveway a bit waiting for the realtor to arrive.

The front door has windows above it, which is how Matt notices a kid running up and down the stairs. He knocks again, forcefully, leaving no doubt in our minds that we are being ignored. Finally, the horizontal blinds part just wide enough to reveal a middle-aged woman’s eyes. “Sorry, the house has already been rented,” she announces.

“Since Wednesday?” (Rachel had made the appointment earlier this week and was told Sunday was the earliest the house could be shown).

“Yes, we moved in yesterday.”

At this point our indignation is building. What kind of a realtor does this? Rachel gets on the phone to call them, no answer. Suddenly one of the upstairs windows opens, revealing the leathery, creased face of a lifelong smoker.

“What are you doing here?” Smoker Woman is outraged, accusing us of trespassing with her tone.

“We had an appointment with the realtor to see the place today.”

“Well sometimes things happen, we had the cash and we rented the place and it’s ours now,” she hollers. We’re completely flabbergasted. Why are these people so intimidated by us? Meanwhile, the front door opens and the first woman emerges, brandishing a piece of paper.

“What are you doing in my driveway?! We rented this place! I’m calling the po-lice!” Despite our utter confusion and lack of action, things are rapidly escalating.

Smoker Woman appears to be both on the phone and conversing with a partner deeper within the building, but is talking loudly enough for us to clearly hear her down below.

“Call the cops, they have a Chinese!” Apparently being Asian and wearing a coat turns our 100% SoCal friend Brittany, who was along for the ride, into a hardcore gangster warrior. Still thoroughly confused and unable to reach the realtor, we get back in the car and head home. Not even halfway back, Rachel’s phone rings: It’s none other than the realtor, calling to apologize for being late to the showing. She helpfully offers to give us the lockbox code so we can start touring the house ourselves.

“Hold on, this is getting confusing,” I tell her, turning to Rachel. “Rachel, stop the car, you’ve got to hear this.” We pull over onto the side of the road, Rachel takes the phone and informs the realtor that using the lockbox probably isn’t the best idea as there are, in fact, a number of people already living in the house. The realtor is taken entirely by surprise and promises to call us back.

When she finally does, the situation has escalated even further. The back gate appears to have been broken into and the locks have been changed on the front door, so she can’t get in. The property owners and the police are being called in to deal with this group of belligerent squatters, and would we mind coming back to the house to witness them getting arrested and identify who we had seen inside?

We return to the house to find a surreal situation. Several patrol cars are parked out front, barricading the driveway, cops are milling about, a workman is repairing parts of the house, and people laden with bags of belongings keep tumbling outside. An overweight man is seated, being interviewed by an officer. Several of them had taken flight when the police arrived and were apprehended attempting to flee into the nearby hills. Another kid had been found attempting to escape, a car was parked in the garage, and three or four other people along with their pets had been there as well, completely moved in.

As the cops take statements and the realtor begins to show us the house, the squatters bustle past hauling armloads of stuff out to their cars. Two people are being arrested. The middle-aged woman walks by in tears – the paper she had been waving was a forged lease, pieced together from documents stashed in the house by the realtor for showings. The efforts had scored her a misdemeanor. Some of the others said they had been living out of their car for months, and despite their apparent knowledge of fake leases, breaking into houses, and changing locks, claimed they didn’t make a habit of moving wholesale into miscellaneous houses.

They had broken a number of things inside, perhaps sometime in between spreading pet food all over the sinks and in the corners of the bedrooms. The workman is busily tearing up the floor and mopping, You see, the toilets had been taken out of the bathrooms in order for the floors to be retiled, but the kids had used them anyway. The dog, on the other hand, had preferred the closet. A paper plate of half-eaten chicken wings sits on the floor of the kitchen, attracting flies. In fact, trash and food scraps of all kinds are piled across the range and countertops. A pair of pants and a shoe insole lie forgotten in one of the upstairs hallways. The backyard fence is partially collapsed. We continued to tour the house, owners, realtor, and workman all insisting that random people don’t typically move into their rental properties unannounced.

Once we’d seen everything, we left, still not entirely sure what had happened. We debriefed our aching minds each other over a hearty meal at Souplantation, and decided to put in an application.