"The Crazy Ones" Installment #1

   I lived in Schaghticoke for a year, in a second floor  apartment  above that of a crazy woman and her alienated  teenaged daughter.  I don't use the word crazy lightly, as that is what we called such people in those days.  I was "expecting" for most of that year, as we didn't use the word pregnant in those days, expect for clinical references.  Socially speaking, you could be crazy, but not pregnant. 
    We didn't spend much time in the apartment because Dave worked in Albany and I in Cambridge, right up to a few weeks before the baby was born, so our interaction with our downstairs neighbor was initially on a very limited basis.  When we moved in, Birdie came upstairs to introduce herself, and also to ask if I wanted to buy some potholders she'd made. I think they were a quarter each, and they've been at the bottom of my kitchen drawer for a long time now, having been too skimpy to be of any real use.  I found  both her name and her sales effort to be a little strange, but I probably attributed both to her being from the South.  (What did I know, I'd never met anyone from North Carolina before.)
     Dave's job at the time took him to Rochester, so I lived alone for much of that first winter, except for weekends when he would drive home.  One day, there was a knock at the door.  I answered it to find a State Trooper standing there.  "I hate to ask you this question, Ma'am," he said, "but I have to.  Do you have a relative of your downstairs neighbor locked in your attic? She claims you do."  I said no, he apologized again, and left.  That was the beginning of a nightmarish year.