HOW THIS ALL BEGAN

This week I will tell all (most? part? some? just a little?) regarding what The Book is about and why it took me so ridiculously long to write it. The Book is titled "How to Live With a Ghost," but I still call it The Book because that's how it has identified itself since the beginning of the beginning. 

It's about a woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts who buys a house rumored to have a ghost.

It took me forever to write because life.

Now you can get on with your day.

 

Oh. You want more?

 

It's about woman who doesn’t believe in ghosts or love who buys a house rumored to have a ghost and a hot neighbor. (He's real, not a rumor.) He doesn’t believe in love, either. Of course he doesn’t. They’re already perfect for each other. Oh. And there are dogs. Of course there are dogs. I can't tell you any more.

 

Okay, what kind of book is it? This is where things got complicated. Books are categorized by genres, and there are fairly specific guidelines about which content qualifies for what genre. To make matters worse, there are sub-genres, which go down all kinds of rabbit holes. I struggled to identify which genre The Book belonged in. I called it a paranormal because ghost. It’s also kinda a romance because hot neighbor. And mysterious things happen which the protagonist must solve, so mystery.

 

 

At this point I feel compelled to make one thing clear. This book is rated PG13. The language is generally clean, but sometimes people have to say what they have to say and everyone has their favorite words. There is no mention of thrusting or moaning or throbbing male members or quivering thighs or any other anatomically correct body parts doing things you would not want to read aloud to your grandmother. Everyone keeps their clothes on—more or less—and there are smoldering looks and witty repartee for your enjoyment. If you're looking for Laurell K. Hamilton, this isn't it.

 

I think your grandmother could read this book
and not have a cardiac event.

It might be easier to tell you what The Book is NOT. It’s not a romance, dark romance, fantasy, romantasy, suspense, horror, thriller, police procedural, Western, paranormal, sci-fi, mystery, cozy mystery, literary fiction or biography. Good grief—by the time I dismissed all those genres, I was starting to wonder if The Book was destined to wander aimlessly through eternity, un-genre-fied.

 

The Book doesn’t take itself too seriously. It doesn’t have deep philosophical themes you would discuss at a book club, aside from the usual crap life throws at a person. It would be enjoyable to read on a rainy evening with a glass of wine in hand and a warm dog on your lap. Or on a sunny beach with an umbrella drink and your toes in the sand. You probably won’t need therapy after you read it. (It’s been two years and I’m still recovering from Grady Hendrix’s “How to Sell a Haunted House.” That’s a great book, just not when you’re cleaning out your childhood home. Alone. The stuffed animals are watching me. Make them stop.)

 

 

So I went along calling it a paranormal/romance/mystery. Then I was informed by People Who Know More Than I Do About These Things, that it is not.

 

It’s women’s fiction.

 

When the first editor told me my paranormal/romance/mystery was women’s fiction, I smiled politely and hoped I didn’t look like the village idiot. No idea if I succeeded. Google informed me women’s fiction is a commercial fiction genre (oh holy hell, then I had to figure out what commercial fiction was—basically, it’s mainstream fiction—dear God in heaven why couldn’t they just have called it that in the first place) that centers on a female protagonist’s emotional journey and personal growth and explores themes of relationships, identity and life challenges.

 

That sounds like a lot to unpack. The Book is not that heavy, I promise. It’s women’s fiction with elements of paranormal, mystery and romance. So there. (Sticks tongue out)

 

It took me forever to write it and I thought about it for twice that long before I typed the first sentence. I’d always wanted to write a story about a woman who bought a haunted house, which is a pretty vague plot line and probably why it took so long for me to actually hang a story on it. I started writing somewhere around 2015 and messed with it off and on in the manner of someone doing something they don’t seriously expect to finish. I just enjoyed escaping into my self-designed parallel universe, you know, where the unicorns run by and everything sparkles. It was so different from the grind of city council and schoolboard stories I did for my day job. Community journalism is great, but there’s only so much waste water treatment plant angst and county supervisors wind turbine feuds a girl can take. (Disclaimer: there are no sparkly unicorns in the book. Sorry.)

 

 The element of time played a big part in getting “How to Live with a Ghost” out of my head and onto a Word document. Specifically, having enough of it to sit down and create coherent sentences (paragraphs, scenes, chapters and sections that sounded like they knew each other) without interruptions. When you add spouse, pets, day jobs, domestic engineering and the need to avoid slowly calcifying into a desk goblin, it’s a challenge to find time.

 

I am pretty sure I looked like this several times while writing "Ghost."

 Plus, there was the reality that when I finished it, I would have to get serious about letting other people read it, otherwise I'd just committed a gigantic waste of time. This was even scarier than looking out the kitchen window and seeing a cow wandering by. Followed by another cow . . . and another . . . and another . . . and just when your brain registers that the cows are out, you realize they are not your cows. The neighbor's cows being out are only marginally less terrifying than your own cows being out. Cows were definitely a reason it took so long to write The Book. Or at least I’m blaming them.

 

These critters are where they are supposed to be. Behind secure fences.
That is not always the case with critters.

Next week: drafts, editing and other things that panic first-time novelists. Maybe they panic veteran novelists, too. That’s the weird part about being a writer: you write things for people to read, then you're terrified when you have to let someone to read them.

 

DANCING IN THE MOONLIGHT

Cue King Harvest:
. . . It's a supernatural delight, everybody's dancing in the moonlight . . .
(Photo courtesy of MarthaStewart.com)

 

Hi. I’m back. And just in case you missed me shouting about it earlier this week, I’m over the moon excited to announce my first novel, “How to Live With a Ghost,” will be published by Pearl City Press. The manuscript is headed into copy editing and a designer has started working on the cover art. There are a few other odds and ends to wrap, after which it will all go into layout and then IT WILL BE A REAL LIVE BOOK!

 

Ahem. Sorry for yelling. I have big feels about this.

Life right now is kinda like Raider and Extra Cat: wanting something really badly, 
then not being sure what's going to happen when you actually get it.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 I’m hauling this blog out of hibernation (or back from Timbuktu or wherever the Gypsy took herself off to the last year and a half) as a way to share the journey, as well as a platform for shameless self-promotion, which is incredibly, stupidly, painfully hard for introverted writers who would like nothing more than to be left alone with their characters and a big pot of coffee. In any event, the Gypsy is back in the saddle and galloping headlong into this new adventure.

 

THE GYPSY AND ‘THE BOOK’

When I created The Ink-Stained Gypsy a few years back, I planned for her to write witty observations about the random craziness of life. Guess what? There was so much crazy going on there wasn’t time to write about it. There was The Job I walked away from after 35 years. No regrets. There was The Family Estate to deal with, which was not nearly as glamorous as it might sound.

 

The Chaos Goblin in action. All gas, no brakes.
(Photo by Sharla Glick/Glick Photography)

 Then there was The Chaos Goblin’s obedience career to manage. If you’ve met the Chaos Goblin, you understand the level of crazy involved there. On top of it all, there were family health crises, check-engine-soon lights, loose cows, tornadoes in the back 40, sheep running amuck (WTH, we don’t even own sheep), planting seasons, harvest seasons, several AirBNB adventures I am glad I survived, field fires and raccoons in unexpected places.

 

Through it all, I was writing The Book. I’ve been writing The Book for so long, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing The Book. Just ask the Farmer. About once a year, he’d ask me, “Are you still writing that book?” Yes. I was. It appeared to be a permanent condition.

 

Writing a book is easy. You just tell a story. You have words, right? After you’ve strung about 90,000 of them together in a coherent fashion, you’re done. Then you try to publish it and discover if there was a way to do something wrong, you’ve done it to the tenth degree.

 

Fortunately, I have been training dogs since I was 9 so I’m master-level caliber at screwing things up and starting over. Somewhere during the initial manuscript critiques and beta readers, I encountered people who cared that I was writing The Book. They came from unexpected places: former newspaper colleagues, connections made at a writers’ conference and friends with previously unknown mad literary skills. The universe conspired to set me on a crash course with them and, after an existential crisis about the Oxford comma, here we are.

 

Next post: what The Book is about and why it took me so ridiculously long to write it.

The winter of our discontent

January has 31 days that last approximately 27 weeks. We intrepid Midwesterners are making good use of our time by shoveling snow, obsessing about that weird noise the furnace is making, checking water lines to make sure they’re not frozen, busting drifts to the LP tank to check the gauge and wondering what scientific principle causes snow to form the biggest drifts in the most inconvenient spots. 

By the way, that wheezing, gasping noise the furnace makes? Like its jeans are too tight because it ate too many sugar cookies over Christmas? Pay attention ‘cuz you’ll need to explain it to the repairman when it quits. Quits making the noise and quits making heat. Pretty much in that order.

 

That’s how we started the new year. Our furnace went AWOL on Jan. 1. It got fixed the next day but until then, there was about a week when the house was . . . chilly. I take a dim view of being chilly. Fortunately, I have a lot of clothes to prevent that condition. I put them all on and waddled around like the Michelin man.

 

The repair guy was prompt and professional. He ripped a lot of old furnace innards out and put a lot of new furnace innards in. He explained it all in great detail. The only two things I understood were “This is going to be expensive” and “You need to replace your 20-year-old air conditioner because the (insert technical explanation here) is screwing up your furnace motor.” I had a hard time thinking about air conditioners when I was swaddled in layers of silk, fleece and wool, topped off by my sexy new Carhartt vest. Hey, in farm fashion, form follows function and warm is damn sexy.

 

Aside from the furnace crisis, this winter got off to a slow start with a little snow here and a little snow there. In fact, we got zero snow in December which in absolutely no way prepared us for the second week of January when it started snowing and didn’t stop until sometime in March.

 

You may have noticed I am having problems with linear time. Winter messes with the space/time continuum and as a result, I am sure it’s been winter for at least six months and we may never see the sun again.

 

 As meteorologists predicted dire wolves around every corner with the coming winter storm, I did the traditional pre-storm prep. I went to the grocery store and bought milk, eggs, chocolate chips and bread. Or I would have if there’d been any bread. The shelf was bare except for a package of very tired looking hamburger buns. I guess everyone else had the same idea. I filled R2’s gas tank, which made no sense because if it snowed as much as they said it was going to, no one was going anywhere for a very long time.

 

Then I came home and de-pooped the dogs’ yard because I figured it might be June before I saw bare ground again. I saluted all the yard work that hadn’t gotten done in the fall, then went indoors to wait for the snow to start. I confess to harboring a secret delight while awaiting the approaching snowmageddon, like a 10-year-old, anticipating school being canceled. 

 

We got about 22 inches of snow, which amounted to something stupid like 75% of our normal winter snowfall coming over four days, complete with howling wind that dropped windchills to -30. Everything that could freeze solid, did. Except our furnace which chugged along like the happy little camper it was after we dropped beaucoup (everything sounds better in French) bucks on it the previous week and promised it a new air conditioning unit to keep it company, providing we didn’t freeze to death before it could be installed.

 

County road north of our house. (Photo by Taylor Hagen)

“No mosquitos, no alligators, no hurricanes” became my mantra as I shoveled open the back door so the dogs could get out to do their thing. For reasons known only to Ma Nature, trillions of tiny little snowflakes swirl over our house on the north wind and drop directly onto the patio in front of the back door.

 

Banner has always been a dog who will cheerfully pee anywhere, including on rocks, dirt, cement, asphalt and anything that is snow-covered. In an attempt to keep him from creating a frozen dog pee skating rink on the patio, I had to shovel that damn drift repeatedly. Which annoyed me. I spent a good deal of this month being annoyed.

 

The first round of snow was like shoveling water. The mercury hadn’t fallen out of the bottom of the thermometer yet and the relatively warm temps meant snow with a high water content and weighed about 20 pounds per scoop. I read somewhere the indigenous people of the north have multiple words for snow, depending on if it’s heavy, wet, dry, fluffy, marshmallow-flavored, etc.

 

I have one word for snow. Use your imagination.

The snow was pretty for about 10 minutes. And then it wasn't.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

Snow before Christmas conjures images of sledding, hot cocoa, snowball fights and romantic walks with your sweetie through a forest of twinkling evergreens like a Hallmark movie. Snow in January is something that makes you swear and throw your shovel in a temper fit and start checking real estate listings south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

 

When it stopped snowing, winter got serious about getting its cold on. This meant the county snowplows were faced with miles of rural roads covered in eight- to 10-foot drifts the consistency of hardened cement. One county snowplow driver reported clearing two miles in an eight-hour day. Their standard operating procedure was ram it, back up and ram it again. They broke loose about six feet at a time.

 

We didn’t go anywhere. Everything was closed. All of it. The entire state.

 

 I routinely re-shoveled the drift outside the back door so the dogs could get out and so Banner wouldn’t kill us all when we slipped on frozen dog pee on the patio and wiped out. Dog owners know this is a thing. The struggle is real.

 

I wish I had taken more pictures but there was the whole frostbite issue, not to mention the dogs wouldn’t stay outside longer than it took to do what needed doing, so the photo ops weren’t great.

 

When we finally DID get out, driving was kind of like bumper bowling.
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

Just when we got dug out and the IDOT started using the term “normal winter driving conditions” with a sort of desperate optimism, here came the freezing rain to put a nice little ice glaze over the top of everything. And fog so thick even Rudolph would have filed a complaint with his union rep.

 

By some predestined marketing miracle, there were no cattle on Wichmann Farms’ yards for the first winter in 32 years when the shi-, um snowstorm, hit. This meant no twice-a-day livestock chores made more difficult by having to clear snow and deal with frozen gates, waterers, tractors, silo unloaders, feeder wagons and body parts.

The Farmer, who admitted to feeling kind of lazy (an unheard term, when applied to farmers in general and this Farmer in particular) without any cattle on feed in December when the sun was shining and the temps floated merrily in the 40s, looked out the window on the first -30 windchill morning with snow screaming across the plains, smiled broadly and sat back down to watch Good Morning America. 

 

And here we are now, amidst the over-hyped January thaw, slopping through the rotten snow and rain and slush and mush and everything is wet and cold and dirty and we’re all crabby.

 

The key to keeping my sanity? Garden catalogs. And maybe a little tipple of Bailey’s in my hot cocoa.

 

I think the HVAC guys are coming to install our new air conditioner next week.

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . .
(Photo by Melinda Wichmann)

 

 

 

It's a wrap

In a nutshell, 2023 was six months of desperation followed by two months of sweat and exhaustion, ending with wondering what day it was and trying to exorcise the demons that demanded I be frantically busy from morning to night.

The new year started by doubling down on cleaning out Mom’s house (hereafter known as The House), following her passing in late 2022. I didn’t have an end game in sight beyond a vague notion of a sale at some point. I literally couldn’t think beyond the immediate need to sort through the accumulation of six decades that filled each room. And the garages, barn, chicken house, granary and machine shed. They say nothing will make you a minimalist faster than having to clean out your parents’ house. They are right.

 

Also, the ancient furnace at The House went out. Multiple times. My immersion into being an absentee landlord (even for a vacant house) was not a kind and gentle one. I had the local plumbing and heating service on speed dial. January involved a lot of coffee.

 

 And there was a tornado in Iowa County. A freaking tornado in January. Guess who took this photo? It was not me. I was in the basement with the dogs, like any good NWS-trained storm spotter who is not interested in doing an intercept on her back porch, which was exactly where that thing was headed until it had the good sense to lift about a mile southwest of our house. It was rated an EF0 or EF1 but still managed to tear up some neighbors’ trees and buildings and flip a semi on Interstate 80.

 

 February was a 28-day repeat of January, including the coffee and furnace issues at The House but minus the tornado. 

 

In March, Banner threw up a nail. I have no idea why he ate a nail in the first place. It is further proof this dog would survive the zombie apocalypse. He would eat the zombies before they ate him.

 

 

March brought another round of wild weather, with a severe thunderstorm that did a number on our trees and farm buildings. The storm also left a spectacular display of mammatus clouds in its wake. This delighted me because until then, I’d only seen mammatus while watching reruns of “Storm Chasers.” 

 

 Things started to get a little twitchy with my job in the spring. The shine had gone off the new publisher’s promises to make everything sparkly and golden in my ragged little newspaper kingdom. Opinions were voiced. Things were said. I was handed a fifth paper to run, in addition to the four I was already struggling to keep afloat as the sole full-time editor/reporter/photographer and chief mugwump. 

 

April was a blur. I went to dog shows and kept cleaning out The House. I also made a Big Decision.

 

May brought a trip to USASA nationals, a delightful escape from reality, confirming my decision to follow the meme and build a life I didn’t need to escape from.

 

I came home from nationals and quit my job. I’d been running the papers solo since 2019, with a few dedicated stringers who kept me from totally losing my mind but it was clear the corporate cavalry was never going to send reinforcements. I was burned out, stressed out, up to my eyeballs in dealing with The House and my parents’ farm, being executor for Mom’s estate and acting as care advocate for my aunt in a care center. I was living on iced coffee and Mt. Dew. This was not a sustainable life plan.

 

I smiled as I walked out of the office for the last time. No regrets. Zero ducks to give.

 

 Summer was a whirlwind of cleaning and decisions at The House. What to keep? What to sell? What is this worth? What IS this? 

 

I brought home a few special pieces and let the rest go. One of the best discoveries was this flower garden quilt, hand-pieced by my grandma Hanson, who died before I was born.

 

One of the more memorable achievements of The House’s clean-out was orchestrating the move of a walnut blanket chest handmade by my grandfather down the suicide stairs from the second floor. The Farmer said it wouldn’t fit. I said it would. The chest was 27 inches wide. The staircase was 27.5 inches wide. I was careful not to point out who was right because I needed the person who was wrong to help move the thing. The move was accomplished without getting 911 involved and both the Farmer and my bro-in-law are still speaking to me.

 

The end was in sight. We hauled over a ton of junk to the landfill. Wonderful friends helped me box and price what remained. So. Many. Boxes. I may have developed an unnatural inclination to fondle boxes while whispering, "My precious."

They also helped carry things down from the second floor and no one took a header down the stairs, which is saying quite a bit. A Sawzall was involved in order to get a few things out. I am not kidding. Seriously. I continued to be grateful we'd come this far without getting a trauma center involved and was confident I was marching toward victory in the battle of Woman vs. House.

 

 In spite of the prep for the estate sale dominating nearly every aspect of my life through the summer, I stuck with my goal of training with Raider in two new places each week from May 1 through Sept. 1. I cannot emphasize how effectively this knocked my rose-colored “He’s perfect at home so he knows how to do it, right?” glasses right off my face. We worked through rabbits in the Conroy Park, squirrels in the Williamsburg Park and ghosts at the Homestead Church Museum. Raid thinks this chunk of sidewalk in Williamsburg belongs to him. It has his name on it and everything. 

 

 In August, my folks' estate sale was blessed with decent weather, fantastic turn-out and tons of help from incredible friends. And if I never have to do another one, it will be too soon.

 

By Sept. 1, The House was listed with a realtor. I celebrated another trip around the sun with a homemade chocolate cake. It was extra good because I put it on my grandma’s antique cut glass cake stand. 

 

Autumn arrived and Raider and I enjoyed more trials. He was good and he was bad and he got some ribbons and pieces of paper that claim he Knows Things. He is the best Chaos Goblin ever.

 

(Photo by Pix 'N Pages)

In November, I signed the final papers, passing The House to a new owner. The relief was palpable and bittersweet.  

 

So now I’m sitting here as the old year fades, relieved that a lot of really hard things are behind me and thankful for the friends (and dogs and coffee) who helped me put them there. I’m not sure what retirement is supposed to feel like but I can appreciate the deadlines I live by now are of my own creation. And I’m getting a little better at doing nothing some days and being happily exhausted from it.

 

(Photo by Kathy Davidson)

Wishing you all the very best in the coming year.

So long, farewell

I signed the papers to sell Mom and Dad’s house a few weeks ago. This closed a 15-month saga that involved a serious relationship with the Louisa County solid waste department, my first (and last) estate sale and an education about deeds, abstracts, surveyors, realtors, subdivision regulations and the county board of supervisors, not to mention prospective buyers who made absurd offers as if they did not understand the concept of math. 

My grandmother, Laurel Hanson, at The House

 

The House (yes, uppercase, it was a law unto itself and deserving of being a proper noun) and farm in southeast Iowa were home to three generations of my family, starting with my grandparents, John E. and Laurel (Gaskell) Hanson, who settled there in the 1930s.

 

John and Laurel Hanson, my grandparents.
If I were a better family historian, I'd be able to
provide a date but am guessing it was taken in the 1950s.

Signing the final paperwork to sell the newly surveyed acreage (house and farm outbuildings) was bittersweet. Even though I hadn’t lived there for 40 years and the place had given me more gray hair in the last year than any of my dogs and The Farmer combined, it was hard to accept that every signature on every document made it that much closer to no longer being mine.

The House fell squarely on my shoulders after mom’s death. Her sister, who had lived with her since my father died, had moved to a care center and the place was sitting empty (figuratively speaking), never a healthy situation for houses in the country. If anything was to be done with the family farmstead, I was going to have to do the doing. 

 

From October of 2022 through late summer of this year, I spent most weekends making the 200-mile round trip to The House to clean and sort and pitch. It was an odyssey of garbage bags and WTF discoveries and childhood memories.

 

Mom was a saver and not a terribly organized one. I’ll just leave it at that. I’d find cash stashed in boxes filled with yellowed recipe clippings and 10-year-old receipts for Casey’s pizza. This meant every dusty box, envelope and file folder had to be sifted through, lest I toss Ulysses S. Grant and Ben Franklin out with the bathwater.

 

My dad, Frank Hanson, before his service in the Korean War

 

We’re not going to talk about Mom's will, which I may or may not have thrown out. There WAS a will. I found multiple copies, all carefully stamped COPY in red ink. Where the original dwelt remains a mystery for the ages. It was not in any of the appropriate places where one might put one’s will—like on file at the lawyer’s office or a safe deposit box in the bank. Mom’s sister swore it was in an envelope on the kitchen counter.

 

This was not helpful intelligence.

 

However, since there were about 5,000 other assorted items piled in teetering stacks on the kitchen counter, I’m sure it was perfectly safe there. No one would have ever found it, including me. By the time I’d started sorting through the archaeological dig that was the kitchen, I’d already stumbled across a box of cash totaling $4,973 in small bills so I was wise to my mother’s proclivities. I threw out nothing without examining it closely first.

 

Nonetheless, the will remained AWOL.

 

I admit to harboring uncharitable thoughts about how much easier my life would be if a natural disaster were to reduce The House to ash or rubble. Through the spring and summer of 2023, I held my breath every time a tornado warning was issued for Louisa County. At first, I prayed a nice, short track EF5 would decimate the whole place and turn it into little more than an insurance claim and a phone call to a guy with a bulldozer. As the summer progressed, my thoughts changed to pure panic whenever severe weather rolled through. I was terrified that was exactly what would happen and all my dusty weekend hours of filling trash bags would be for naught.

 

Spring - 1980s; we never sprayed for dandelions.
The bees must have been so happy.

In the end, The House withstood everything Mother Nature threw at it, just like it had for the last 100+ years. The Farmer and I finished cleaning it and outbuildings, held an estate sale, then hired the services of an estate buyer who waved his magic wand and made everything that didn’t sell, vanish. Including the garbage. Seriously. He was marvelous. I could have hugged him if it hadn’t been August and I was sweating like a water buffalo. By that point I was close to losing my ever-loving sh*t if I had to deal with another box of 1960s kitchenware or the hulk of some antique whatchamacallit that threatened to dissolve into rust if we had to move it one more time. 

 

I met the new owner for exactly 45 minutes at the closing. He was genuinely delighted with the property and even though I think his pleasure was geared more to the barn and outbuildings than The House, his  obvious joy made it easier to hand over the keys. I signed the last document and shook his hand, suddenly wanting to tell him about the bee tree in the north corner of the grove behind the barn and how I used to sit near it and listen to bees humming merrily away and if I was brave enough to get close, I could see the combs, dripping honey deep in the trunk. I wondered if it was still there. How long do bees stay in one place?

 

And how there used to be a row of red cedar trees lining the driveway until straight-line winds (it was a derecho before anyone knew what derechos were) in June of 1998 dropped a couple of them on The House and my parents had them all cut down.

 

And how the original pocket doors from the first floor were still out in the granary, their fanciful Victorian hardware rusting away, a victim of the energy crisis in the 1970s, when The House’s high ceilings were lowered and the pocket doors removed.

 

Pocket door hardware. The House had
doorknobs and hinges to match.

 

And how the second floor bedroom, the one painted Pepto Bismol pink, was mine—my eyrie at the top of The House where I spent endless hours lost in books, only slightly disappointed my parents would not allow me to have a television in my room although my friends thought this was the height of neglect.

 

And that the draft horse harnesses used by my Grandpa Hanson were still hanging in the loft of the century-old barn with its pegged mortise and tenon joints.

 

And about all the time I spent in that barn, looking for nests of kittens in the spring.

 

And the endless parade of wildlife that routinely marches across the lawn between The House and the adjacent field on its way to and from the business of wild creatures in the river bottoms—deer, wild turkeys, pheasants, raccoons, skunks, possums and the occasional fox and coyote.

 

And the front porch, with its curlicue millwork, where my mom used to sit and watch while I trained my 4-H project dogs on the lawn on summer evenings.

 

And all the fruit trees (apple, cherry, apricot and persimmon), the asparagus and strawberry beds and rhubarb patch that my parents used to cultivate.

 

And how the kitchen smell of melted wax when I blew out the candles on my birthday cakes—homemade angel food with Mom’s sticky white frosting—and of tart, sweet fruit and sugar when she and Dad made jam in the summers.

 

The House

And about the 25+ black walnut trees that still are, thanks to my Grandma Hanson’s love of walnuts. (The guy didn’t look stupid. He’ll figure that out in a hurry.)

 

And the scent of a fresh cut river bottom cedar tree filling The House at Christmas.

 

And the suicide stairs to the second floor. Okay, they're the only stairs to the second floor. You got used to them.

 

And why there is a plaster bust of Native American Chief Keomah sitting in front of the attic door because if you don’t prop the door open when you go inside, it swings shut and even though it doesn’t latch, believe me, when you are 13 years old and already reading too much Steven King and the attic door closes of its own accord, you learn not to take chances. (Chief Keomah’s plaster likeness was a showmanship prize at a dog show back in the 1970s. I hope the new owner appreciates his door stop abilities.)

 

But in the end, I didn’t say any of it because these were my memories to treasure and didn’t need to be shared with strangers. The new owners will make their own and if any of them overlap, then I hope the discoveries bring them as much happiness as I found there.

 

The House, autumn 2023