Going Home by Sydney Chaney Thomas (miss read books txt) 📕

padlock. We can’t knock on the door because we can’t really jump the fence. I point out the barn, the several small out buildings, and the farmhouse that is devastatingly dilapidated. Before we turn to go, a man walks towards us. He opens the gate and lets us in and we introduce ourselves. Ray has just started leasing the property. He walks around the grounds with us, and with his gentle voice, tells us the barn is condemned so we can’t go inside. It has the look of many barns along this highway in the way it’s leaning and tilting as if it were made of wet cardboard. The trees and wild flowers make up for the sad condition of the buildings, there is an inspiring beauty here that anyone can see. After days of thinking I can’t wait to get home, I start to imagine what it would be like to live here again and I imagine myself fixing this place up, romanced by the idea of horses and cattle and land like my parents before me.

Ray follows us around and talks. He’s only been here two months. The house has been vacant for many, many years. It has no heat. Kindly, he says he wouldn’t want me to see the condition of the inside of it, at least not until he has a chance to replace the sheet rock and get the place in order. He really likes it here he says, the owner, the man my mother sold the property to is in a nursing home now. Ray hopes it takes a long time to sell and he can stay here for a while. From the looks of the place and the price it appears that he’ll be here for some time. He’s a man in his 50’s and lives here with his girl friend. His daughter comes to visit, now and then, but won’t sleep upstairs anymore because of the “ghost”. He laughs and tells us he doesn’t know if it’s true or not, he himself doesn’t really believe in ghosts, but that’s what she says. I’m not surprised. Ghosts were featured in every part of my childhood.

My daughters are chasing kittens, but they run away and hide under the cars parked in the gravel driveway. My dog runs off and defecates happily in the soft grass. I stand and look around. There are no fences now around the house, there is no yard like we once had, just a gravel drive and rambling blackberry bushes and weeds. The pond is even over grown with wild mint and blackberry. I am finally able to orient myself by finding the hazelnut and walnut trees. The apple orchard behind the house has all but disappeared. Only a few trees with twisted limbs remain. The grape vines and their supporting structures are gone without a trace.

Our host jogs back into the house and returns with an enormous bottle of warm milk with a teat on it so my girls can feed his calves. My dog chases one calf through the trees while my daughters take turns fighting over the bottle, one winning out at a time and finally they manage to feed both as I talk to Ray. He takes me to one of the out buildings, which are in surprising good shape compared to the rest of the property. I step into the darken cavern of the building and he shows me an old wringer washer that had belonged to my mother, and then an old oxygen tank, used by my father in his final days. They are still here. These are the parts of them that remain - like old artifacts.

As I stand talking to Ray about the real estate market and fixing up the house I glance over to see my daughters and beautiful Dagny standing together in front of the old gate that leads into the pasture where the pond is, the gate is overgrown with blackberries now, impossible to open. My ten year old is covered in red juice, she’s laughing and licking her delicate fingers with their red tips, my little eight year old carefully pulls the fragile fruit from the branches and pops them in her mouth without a mess, and there between them, I see myself, the ghost of the girl that I once was, at nine.

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Publication Date: 12-23-2009

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