Tell me a story.

[Neesy]

I too would love to hear more stories of the Blue Ridge. My wife and I love roaming it aimlessly though mostly in North Carolina. The story of the old boarding house reminded me of something which happened the first time I showed my new bride my granny's old place.

My wife is psychic. I know you won't believe that but it's true. When our son broke his arm visiting his uncle she knew something was wrong immediately and told me so. I poo pooed it but she knew. She got hold of her mother and found out she was right. She knows things somehow. I have to hide my innermost soul because she might see what a blackguard I am. I'm not always successful. She loves me anyway.

Shortly after we first married I led her around my grandmothers big old Victorian home. My granny was the sweetest most gentle old girl who used to let us kids have the run of the place and we did. We ate her teacakes and drank her cocoa and rattled the floorboards with our running feet in all the rooms but one. We didn't play much in the parlor. About the only thing we ever did there was hold seances because for some reason it was a creepy room. We never went in there alone.

The seances were fun though. It made a good excuse to hold hands with the neighbor girls. We would intone in our most spooky voices for the spirit of a local Indian chief to "give us a sign". Someone would toss a coin across the room or knock over a book and then a hand would creep up a slender back and squeals and laughter would erupt. My cousins are very much like me.

The house was empty as I gave my wife a tour of my old memories. Watching dough made from scratch be flattened by a rolling pin and cut with an empty can to form biscuits that I would split and top with butter and sugar in the kitchen. Playing the Barnabus Collins game in the living room while the belly of a Fatso stove burned cherry red to push back the cold. The bedroom where quilts six deep kept the cold from young giggling boys not willing to let go of a day full of play. The couch where grandma told us morality tales crafted on the spot and as interesting as any in any book made. Just one more grandma. Grandma is tired boys. But she always would. We didn't know she was dying of cancer. I wish I could hear her voice one more time.

While recounting all these memories and walking through the rooms I love so much everything I saw brought forth a flood. I stepped into the foyer where the old Philco cabinet radio stood and looked into the courtyard where the well still stood and recalled the echoing ping of the water cylinder as it made it's way up the pipe and the squeak of the large ornate pulley as the rope threaded through it. I could see it outlined against the sky on it's lintel. I could feel the soft weathered gray rope in my palm.

I stepped across the threshold into the parlor. The old feeling of chill settled on my shoulders. I stared at the fireplace and wondered how long it had been since a fire shed ashes there. I had learned since this is where the bodies of my ancestors lay during wake. My grandmother had lain here looking so alien without the warmth of her smile animating her face. It was the old way to keep them at home until the funeral.

I thought of telling my wife all these things and looked back at where she had stopped short of entering. What was the matter I asked. Why didn't she enter? I hadn't told her anything about this room yet. She had no way of knowing the feelings it conjured. Something in there is looking at me she told me. That's it. That is exactly the way I had always felt about this room but had been unable to put into words. It was so simple and she had pegged it with nothing to go on. I joined her in the foyer.

That was a lovely story - thank you Scratch

 

[GNTLGNT]

...Wow!....that was an amazingly tasty word stew cooked up by our resident writer fellas.....

 

[Scratch]

For some reason, that lovely story brought me back to something a bit sadder, a bit more grim. I haven't thought about it for a while.

My dad had a stroke and was on his way out of the physical world. It took two or three weeks. I still needed to work, and I was driving a lot between my town (Fort Collins) and where he was, a suburb of Denver, somewhat over an hour away. My mom was not much help. She was alternately the Caring Wife and the Angel of Death. I know that sounds weird and horrible, but... well, it wasn't a pleasant time.

He passed peacefully, and we were making arrangements. Meanwhile, on the heels of all this, I had a seminar to give to my colleagues and friends on a Saturday up in the mountains, in Steamboat Springs. They were all properly sympathetic and said to me, hey, your dad just died. Skip this one, pal. But I also knew that they didn't have any substitute seminars, and people looking for their continuing education credits would go without. So I told them, it's okay, no arrangements were being made for that Saturday (which was true), and I'd just come up in the morning, give the seminar, and head back home.

I started early in the morning, going up the Cache la Poudre Canyon, over Cameron Pass, through North Park, across Rabbit Ears pass, and winding down into the Yampa Valley. It was the quintessential Colorado autumn day. The air was vibrant, brisk, the sun bright and sharp. The changing aspen, with their burnished fall leaves fluttering in the wind, displayed golden shimmering veins through the evergreens of the mountains. It was the kind of drive where, if someone asks why you live in Colorado, you think of that and smile and say, "Just because."

It was in the fall, a time of decay, and that did mirror my mood of the moment. But it also promised new life. My daughter and daughter-in-law were both quite pregnant at the time, and the mood, the season, the circumstances of death and upcoming new life, brought a poignant import to that drive.

The seminar went okay. I certainly wasn't in my best form, but I was with forgiving friends, and they insisted I stay a bit and be social. And that went well. Such nice people.

Finally, I left for home, and night was falling. In glimpses through trees and across mountain slopes, the moon was rising in the east. I drove through walls of towering pine, darker than the night sky, the stars awakening above them. I'll never forget the moment that soon came.

I crested a hill going fast on the highway, and between the valley of black evergreen, against the night sky, the moon rose suddenly in its full round glory, bright, luminescent; and stretched across its lower half was a soft, diaphanous line of clouds. It was so unexpected, so sudden, and just so indescribably gorgeous that it took my breath away. I vented an audible gasp. Or maybe a sob. I thought right then, as I still do, that it was a veil across the face of an Arabian princess.

Whether random serendipity or some other force at work, that day more than anything gave me the eulogy from Nature that I needed for my father's death. We are in a cycle. Death is as certain and as necessary as anything else. And life still springs to give us hope and another chance. And even in despair, there is beauty to behold.

This whole story is like a beautiful poem. As you were describing it I was seeing it in my minds eye. I was feeling things as if, maybe not as you, but as a sympathetic passenger on the seat beside you. What a wonderful world we live in. How hard it will be to let it go.