Seventh Day Greetings and Open Thread

         Wishing you a fine Saturday!

I'm contemplating the good old American Road Trip.

Seems like it's almost that time again.

Such a pleasure,

And an excellent provider of perspective!

💚

The Scent of Roses Lingered

 

 

            She had fainted. Then she slept. Her second night in the old house was spent on the floor of the attic. Attics being upstairs, as they are, it was naturally warm enough for relative comfort.
            Her close friend, the cat, stayed right beside her. He woke frequently during the dark hours, just opening his green eyes and listening for her breathing. Content, that she merely slept after the initial rush of emotion and fainting, he also slept. He lay near, watchful and golden in the ambient light from the window.
            The woman lay on her left side. She wore jeans and some sort of cotton knit tunic in deep blue. Her shoulder length brown hair lay on the board floor somewhat tangled. She wasn’t thin. She gave the impression of physical strength. Her feet were bare, as they usually were indoors.
            The sun rose and the attic room filled with light. The cat woke and stretched himself. Then he waited silently.
            At last she woke and sat up, sitting cross legged as she had the night before.
            “My truck is back, Fred,” she said. “And the town. It’s there too!”
            The cat gazed out of the little window with a look of approval. He purred loudly.
            “Was that real?” Terry asked Fred.
            “I heard that knocking on the door too,” said Fred. “That sounded real.”
            “Sure sounded real to me too, Fred. If that was a dream, it was a doozy!” She laughed a little wryly and yawned.
            “I reckon we better head on downstairs, see if the power is back on and make some breakfast. I think I need to go see that cop again, Fred. He is the only human in this town I know to talk to, and he has to put up with me because he’s a public servant!” Terry said.
            “You want me to talk sense to him, Terry,” Fred said.
            “No way! Never you mind, Fred!”
            The second floor looked pleasant, full of morning light.
            The main floor didn’t look haunted either. The power was on. Once again the kitchen window facing east was full of brilliant light. The storm of the night before seemed vague and unreal to Terry now. She almost forgot about it.
            First she made coffee. While it was brewing, she was in a somewhat jolly mood, so she made French toast, which they had with butter and strawberry jam. Fred had lots of butter but no jam. She cut his French toast up into little cubes for him.
            “I need to buy a washer and dryer, don’t I?”
            “Well, you wear clothes, so I guess so,” said Fred. “When this place was last inhabited maybe they did it some other way.”
            “No, you’re talking about a hundred years ago, Fred. They must have gotten rid of the old set when they cleaned this place out,” said Terry.
            “I’m going to get cleaned up, then we have some business to attend to, Fred.”
            An hour later, dishes washed, showered and ready, Terry said, “OK, dude, let’s hit that big old paved road out there. I want to talk to Officer Mike and borrow his phone for minute.”
            “Meow,” said Fred. It was his idea of a joke.
            Fred hopped into his truck box, Terry started the engine, and they rode companionably out onto Main and headed up to the police station. Mike’s SUV was parked out of the sunlight around the side of the building again.
            He was sitting at his desk poking at a laptop computer and looking bored.
            “Good morning, Ms. Reilly. How can I help you?” he said, agreeably.
            “Good morning, Officer! I have questions,” said Terry.
            Mike got up and pulled a big oak chair around in front of his desk, and said, “have a seat ma’am, I aim to answer questions. There is damn little going on in Chase today. But I guess that’s probably a good thing, hey?”
            “That is probably a matter of opinion,” Terry said enigmatically. “Thanks.”
            “Oh. Well. That sounds like it might be interesting,” he said.
            Fred had settled down by Terry’s feet.
            “So, you bring that cat everywhere?” He laughed. “Just call me Mike. It’s easier.”
            “Yeah, call me Terry. Yes, this cat is with me 24/7. He keeps me on the straight and narrow.”
            “What do you want to know,” said Mike.
            “No. 1, I need to know how to get phone and internet out here. Do you have Starlink or what?”
            “No, no, we have T-Mobile here at the office, and it works ok for both. It drops off once in a while, but they all do, don’t they?” he said.
            “May I use your phone and call them then?” said Terry.
            “Sure,” said Mike, and they did that, and suddenly she had phone service, the equipment for internet would arrive in a couple of days.
            “Now, your other question?” He put his hands flat out on his desk top, looking interested.
            Terry looked at this young man. He was slight and young, handsome in a very middle American looking way. Blue eyes, dark hair, kind face. While she was noticing, she was wondering what to tell him.
            Finally she said, “those roses were not the end of the odd things about my house. Somehow, when exploring the basement yesterday, the door upstairs shut itself and locked me and Fred down there. I managed to break out, by shoving the outside door down there so hard that I broke the lock out of the doorframe, which is quite rotten actually. This was strange enough.
            While I was down there, I noticed a strong scent of roses, which makes no sense to me. Does it make sense to you?”
            “Well, no,” said Mike, listening.
            “I need to talk to someone who knows something about that property,” said Terry.
            “Last night we were up in the attic looking out of a small window up there, which I cannot see from outside of the house. That was crazy enough. But while we were looking outside I had some kind of dream or vision in which everything looked like it must have a hundred years ago.
            “Is there a librarian who has been around a while, or a historian of the area or someone that you can introduce me to?”
            Mike looked at Terry like he was making up his mind about something. He still kind of wondered if she was a nut, harmless or otherwise. On the other hand, it was a very dull day there in Chase, AZ and he didn’t mind a bit of mystery to contend with.
            “Yes. Wow. There is someone. I hope she can handle it. Your story is pretty strange. As it happens, I know someone who is an amateur lover of local history, but she is quite old and frail.”
            “I bet she knows all about that old house,” Terry said hopefully in answer. “But I don’t want to upset her.”
            “All we can do is go see her at her place and approach the subject gently and see how she takes it,” said Mike. “Why don’t you and Mr. Kitty there follow me in your pickup?”
            Mike locked up the police office, since no one would be there, and went around the building to get in his vehicle. Terry and Fred climbed back into the pickup prepared to follow him.
            “Mr. Kitty?” said Fred.
            “You’ll live over it,” said Terry, “Mr. Kitty!”
            Mike drove slowly two blocks over on the other side of Main St. He stopped on Sunset St. in front of a little 60s style one story house painted green and surrounded by shade trees. Terry parked behind him.
            Out on the sidewalk, Mike said, “her name is Rochelle Hunter. We may as well go knock. I’m sure she’s noticed we’re out here. There are no flies on Mrs. Hunter. She taught school here so long I think she knew my grandparents. Well, maybe not that far back.”
            Officer Mike Harald, Terry Reilly and Fred stood together on Mrs. Hunter’s small concrete porch. Mike punched the door bell, and they waited out there in the filtered morning sunlight.
            In a moment the door opened, revealing a short elderly lady, with a white updo hairstyle, silver glasses in a chain around her neck, and a cotton print house dress printed with small roses. She looked at them all sharply and said, “good morning, young people and cat. What’s up? I’m dying to know!”
            “Mrs. Hunter, this lady is a new resident in our town here. She bought the old Lindel place over on 2^nd. She has some questions about the history of the house. I figured you were the person to ask,” said Mike.
            Mrs. Hunter laughed out loud. She looked amused, but maybe something else also.
            “Come right in kids and cat! I’ll bet she has questions! I just bet she does!”
            They all followed her in and Mrs. Hunter shut the door firmly behind them.

Link to the whole crazy deal so far.

Peeking Out

 

            Fred’s tail led the way back into the house. Straight up, it was like a pillar of gold.
            I stepped inside, then I carefully locked that door behind myself. I tried the doorknob, making sure it was locked.

           While we had been busy escaping the basement, clouds had covered the sun. It looked dark and somewhat foreboding in the house. I felt hesitant. I wasn't entirely happy to be re-entering the house.
            The air pressure had dropped, I could feel that we were in for a storm. I had a faint memory of other storms. Oddly, though, I couldn’t remember where that would have been. I was sure that it would come to me, this lack must be just a glitch in the memory banks.
            Fred turned and looked at me, then he paced into the kitchen. He hopped up onto the big table. I saw my keys lying there. “Ah, good idea, Fred.”
            I stuffed that key ring into my right hand jeans pocket. That felt good. Secure.
            The wind began to blow hard. It hurled big warm drops of rain at the kitchen window, which had been so sunny that morning, making noisy splats.
            Next thing, the lights went out, then I heard thunder, rolling and rolling again. I gasped! Was it thunder? It almost sounded like wheels on a wooden plank floor.
            “I’m hungry, Terry,” said Fred. In the dim light his green eyes glowed faintly.
            “I can’t cook now, Fred, the power is off,” I said. “We’ll have to eat something cold.”
            “I’m not picky,” said Fred. “One of those cans of tuna will work. You have more yogurt. I saw it in there.”
            “That’s true. I might have to round it out with a peanut butter sandwich. This day has been a bit over the top, makes a girl hungry,” I told him while opening the fridge and looking into its dark interior.
            So, I popped a can of some high-end olive oiled tuna, dumping it into a shallow bowl and putting it on the table for Fred. I also got him a mug of water.
            I gathered up my peach full fat yogurt, my bread and peanut butter, a spoon and a table knife, and another mug of water from the tap in that old sink, then I sat with Fred, and we had our lunch, or seeing how dark it was, maybe it was more like a sort of picnic dinner indoors.
            You will not be surprised to discover that I possessed not one candle. “Preparation is key!” I told Fred. “We better buy some candles tomorrow.”
            “Terry, I think we should go upstairs and check to see if there is a window in the attic,” said Fred. He had fishy breath too.
            “I’m not sure I want to do that,” I said, knowing darn well that I didn’t want to do that.
            But, Fred won as usual when it came to decision making, by sheer persistence. he wanted to take a look, so we were going to take a look.
            “We need to figure out why you bought this place, Terry,” said Fred. I had thought I bought it because it was just what I was looking for. That’s what I had thought. If I remembered correctly. I wasn’t sure to tell the truth.
            “Let’s go,” said Fred, as he hopped off the table and headed for the stairway to the second floor in the fading light. Thunder rolled again. The wind whacked the side of the house repeatedly. My knees felt wobbly, but I proceeded anyway, just as if I were very brave.
            Ghostlike, in my own house, following a yellow tomcat, I felt my way to the stairs, once again climbing to the bedroom floor. The bedrooms' doorways gaped at me darkly. Surely those rooms were quiet. Weren’t they? Thunder pealed out again.
            “Come on, Terry,” called Fred from the stairs to the attic, where he waited for me.
            Breathing shallowly, I followed Fred up those stairs too. I slowly opened the little door. Fred slipped inside ahead of me. Lightning flashed right overhead. The sky rumbled again, and I could see, across that wooden floor, on the front of the building a small window.
            “Oh, Fred! Is it there or not?” I cried out, not entirely trusting my own eyes.
            “Looks like a window,” he answered. He kept walking. “Let’s look out,” he said.
            I walked slowly as in a dream, across that smooth floor, arriving at last to the window. It was one of those attic windows sitting right over the surface of the floor. Fred parked himself to the right side. I parked myself right in front of the glass and looked down toward the street.
            “What do you see, Terry,” he said.
            “I’m not sure,” I said. I didn’t see a Ford pick up parked in front, for one thing. Maybe it just didn’t show somehow? But then lightning lit the street and sky again. Thunder hit like a physical punch. No, there was no pickup truck out there.
            “Where is my Ford,” I wondered aloud. Fred turned and gazed at me wordlessly.
            “There must be something out there,” said Fred, looking down at the street.
            The lay of the land was the same, but everything else was different. I couldn’t see pavement, or even that old cracked sidewalk. Across the dirt lane, there was only a rough field with a barbwire fence running along side of that road.
            I just shook my head, because such things don’t happen. Not on this planet.
            A farm wagon, pulled by two heavy horses, rolled past. A man dressed like an extra in a western movie, sat on a seat behind the horses. He wore a white western hat and a raincoat of some kind. I couldn’t see what he carried in his wagon, maybe just himself.
            The sky quieted down. The storm hustled off to the north. Those thick clouds moved aside, exposing a full round shining brilliant moon.
            An owl flew straight at our window, looking me right in the eye, before abruptly turning upward and vanishing. I heard a ringing sound. I heard voices downstairs in the children’s rooms. I didn’t feel so good.
            As we continued to look downward from our perch under the peak of the roof, a horse and rider approached. When he got closer to our spot on the road I saw that it was a grey and white speckled horse. The rider was a mature, but youngish looking man. Once again, this man appeared to be in the costume of another time. He seemed like he must be wearing his very best clothing. He also wore a western hat, and he carried a bundle in his arms wrapped in brown paper. He stopped right in front of my house.
            He dismounted in one smooth movement. Then he removed the brown paper from his bundle. He folded this paper up and tucked it somewhere around his horse’s saddle. In his arms he carried a great bouquet of white and pink roses.
            He walked his mare across the road, to tie her to the fence. Then he turned and walked up my walkway heading for the front door.
            I heard knocking. I froze. “No,” I said. “No!”

Some Investigation Was In Order

 

🌹"Boo!"🌹

 

             Well, what could I do? It was a nice sunny day, with no dark corners to spook me. So, I decided to search every inch, every closet, the attic, and the basement, which I had not done heretofore. I had no idea what I was looking for. Clues, I guess.

            “Come on, Fred,” I said. “Let’s do the attic first.”
            Fred consented wordlessly. Together, we went to the small wooden stairway in the back of the upstairs hall. Why had I not gone up there before? I had to ask myself that as I looked up that small staircase.
            It was a little wooden room with plain floorboards and exposed rafters. There were no  mysterious trunks, or old bikes or anything to speak of. There was a small window facing the street. I hadn’t noticed that it was there before. I was beginning to doubt my observational skills. The floor was clean. Not dusty. Hm. Nice, I guess.
            We were up there in the top of the house, so, I decided to check closets for hidden passages or whatever!
            There were four bedrooms. Two on each side of the hall. I stood in the first doorway, just looking. I could easily imagine the sound of children here. Yeah. Children make a lot of noise on wooden floors upstairs.
            Each bedroom had a small closet. Each closet was empty. There weren’t even hangers in the closets. These floors were also spotlessly clean. I thought it had been dusty up there when I was in the process of buying the place.
            Fred took a look in each room, inspecting corners, looking for things only cats care about. He seemed content, making no comment.
            We kind of tiptoed back downstairs to the main floor. My house was so big and so silent. Sunlight drifted into the front windows lighting only dust motes, making minuscule rainbows. If you look very carefully, you can see rainbows on them.
            Fred drifted around the living room, in and out of sunbeams. A small orange soul.
            If I was going to live here, I needed to get some pieces of furniture. A sofa maybe, and a couple of chairs. Even I needed somewhere to sit.
            I hadn’t inspected the basement either. There is no time like the present they say. I called Fred, and he came silently to my feet, waiting. The stairway down into the basement of such a house is usually in the back of the kitchen, handy for the bringing up of supplies. And so it was.
            Fred preceded me down the steep stairway. His tail stuck straight up, leading the way. I grabbed the handrail, after flipping the light switch at the top of the stairs, which had no effect. So, we were going down into a deep dark place. There were no windows in the basement. I left the door open up top to hopefully allow some light down there. It wasn’t a lot of light, but some.
            This old basement had a dirt floor. I understood that it was not unusual when a house this old was built, but to my modern sensibilities, it was clammy and unpleasant. There was a faint odor of must or dry rot perhaps. I determined that I would lock the door into this basement and never use it or open it again. Just as I thought that, the door up at the top of the stairs closed firmly and the lock turned. I could sense Fred thinking, “told you so, Terry.”
            I just stood there silently. I’m not a screamer, but that doesn't mean I was fine with it. I felt faint. I could barely take breath.  But gradually, my eyes adjusted to the dim conditions. Little bits of light sneaked in various small cracks. There are always small cracks, especially in such an old house.
            Soon, I saw that there was a door to the outside on the west side of the house because there was a door shaped line of daylight around it. Just a little bit of light . It was probably locked, but I had to try it. Fred and I needed to get out of this basement! As I made my way over there very carefully over that dirt floor, I began to smell a heavy scent of roses. My breath stopped again and my heart went flop. I froze. Then I could see Fred, almost glowing a bit heading for that basement door and I followed him over there. I felt around for a door handle and eventually located one of those faceted glass doorknobs.
            “Oh, Fred,” I said. “What are we going to do?”
            I rattled the doorknob. No go. Then I just pushed on it good and hard. This broke the lock which was above the doorknob loose. I had torn it out of the rotten wood of the door frame. And there we were, suddenly, out in the open. There were three concrete steps up to the ground level beyond a small square pad with a drain in the middle of it.
            This didn’t solve our problem. Everything I owned in the world was in that house on the main floor, including the key to the front door. I had nothing with me. Not even my truck key, or a working phone. I couldn’t even call anyone. I wondered, off handedly, if anyone was home in any of the other houses on 2^nd Ave. I decided that from now on, my keys would live in my jeans pocket, and I was going to get phone service, even if I had to use that police office phone to call someone. I was sure Mike Harald would be fine with it, even if he thought I was crazy, which I was pretty sure he already did.
            But before doing anything like bothering people I didn’t know, I decided to just check the front door to see if by some chance it would open. It didn’t. It was firmly locked. "So careful, to lock doors, aren’t you, Terry," I thought to myself.
            I looked up at the top where the attic window facing the street had been. There was no attic window. Why did I think I had seen one?
            “Fred, we have to check the back door,” I said. Fred was good with that plan.
            Then I walked around to the back over that desert ground, wondering why I had thought there was a window in the attic. I was beginning to wonder if there was an attic, truthfully.
            Fortunately, there was a back door opening into the hall of the main floor. It was there, like it should be.
            I closed my eyes for a moment, wished, prayed, then opened that door which by all rights should have been locked. I stood back to let Fred in first, then I followed him, as I had always done before.

Chasing Enlightenment

 

            Alright. I am a logical woman of thirty years. No wee ingenue. I determined to make sense of this mad data set.
            There are two doorways into this big old house. Both were locked while I was in the tub. Fred didn’t let anyone in. He’s too short, even if he decided to go rogue on me.
            There were six white roses and eight pale pink roses, cool and damp to the touch, tossed over my futon.
            There were no florist’s shops in Chase. It barely had a Dollar General and Sinclair Station. There wasn’t even a realtor. Buying this place was tricky, by the way.
            One possible, but very unlikely, way to get these cold roses to Chase was in a refrigerator truck, like a florist’s van. That was what I call a mathematically possibility.
            How did whoever get in the house? The doors were both still locked. I checked. Unknown. Did he have a key? Was he a previous resident? Seemed unlikely, as the house had been vacant for twenty years. Who waits for twenty years to make this kind of a subversive delivery.
            This left me stranded with the uncanny. I would so much rather it was a breaking and entering crime, of a rather comical nature.
            Going on the hopeful assumption that it was a breaking and entering incident, I decided that Fred and I would go locate the law around here. I knew there was a two man police dept. I had checked on that, and I had seen the office. It was in one of those industrial metal buildings at the other end of Chase.
            Then I thought of something. “Fred,” I said, “did you notice anything while I was in the tub? Like somebody coming in here somehow?”
            “Oh, you mean the flowers? No. Nobody came in here,” said Fred. I sure didn’t think he knew anything. He had been out cold, zonked.
            Why didn’t I just call the police, to make a report and get an officer to come and look at the evidence? Well, no cell service. I hadn’t called T-Mobile and gotten on their Starlink service yet. You can see the difficulty. You need some kind of access to reach them!
            So, Fred and I locked up the house, front and back, and headed out to the street to climb into my old Ford pickup, 1990, geriatric truck. Red and white. I hadn’t locked it. Maybe I would from now on. Inside the cab, on the passenger’s side of the seat, I kept a nice wooden box lined with towels for Fred to ride in. The seat belt went around the box. Fred has been around for a few years, and he needs his comforts. He doesn’t ride the dash under the window these days.
            We rolled over to Main Street and up to the other end of town. I parked in front of that very plain police office building. It was a weekday morning. They had to be open. I saw that the police car was parked around the corner beside the building. I assumed that meant someone was there to answer my pleas.
            The sign on the desk said Officer Mike Harald. I wondered idly if he had a last name too. I’m very funny. After a couple of minutes he came into the room from the back somewhere.
            He looked about 18 to me. The youthful arm of the law.
            In my opinion, Fred looked amused. But he kept his trap shut, thankfully.
            “Hello, ma’am,” said Officer Mike. “I saw your truck parked over in front of the old Lindel place. You buy that pile?”
            “Yes, I did, Officer, and there has been a bit of bother, as they say,” I said.
            “You could have called,” he said.
            “My phone doesn’t work here, yet,” I said. He smiled. He had heard this before.
            “What happened? Did somebody break in, or egg the house or something?”
            “I’m not sure. It’s a little too much for me to figure out on my own,” I said. “I was in the bathroom for a while, and when I came out and went into the bedroom, I found a bunch of roses thrown all over the bed.” I clammed up then and looked at him to see how he would take this. “And they were cool, and fresh too. Like they just came out of a refrigerator.”
            He didn’t look happy. “Ma’am, is this a joke? Are you here to make some kind of trouble?” he asked.
            “Officer, I don’t like it any better than you do. In fact, I will admit to being pretty freaked out by it. I don’t see any reasonable way for it to have happened.”
            We kind of stared at each other for a minute. Finally, he said, “well, let’s go over there and I will investigate, and make a report.”
            On the way back to No. 7, my house on 2^nd Ave, I drove by a woman walking down Main in a floor length gown and a big sun hat decorated with flowers. She glanced briefly at my truck and then looked down.
            What a strange town Chase was turning out to be. My stomach wasn’t sure what to think. I was feeling a little fluttery.
            I parked. Mike parked behind me. We all got out. We walked between my cacti on the cracked walk up to the porch silently. I felt like I was in a sort of defensive position with this officer, like I was  having to prove something to him.
            Well, I hadn’t been egged. I guess it was soap. On the small window, high up in that heavy old door was written in an old fashioned hand, “Find Me!”
            I burst out in tears.
            “I loved this house! Is this town crazy?” I sort of yelled.
            “Ma’am, hang on. Let’s go in and check it out,” said Officer Mike Harald.
            “Sir, my name is Terry Reilly. You may as well start using it,” I said, damply.
            “OK, Ms. Reilly. Let’s go in and look it over,” he said.
            I unlocked the door, and we went in. The living room looked just like I had left it.
            There were no roses in the bedroom. Not one!
            He looked through all the rooms. He wrote on a clipboard. He looked at me with a strange expression.
            Then, he left me and Fred there.

Me and Fred and the Dream House

 

            Fred, the fat tomcat, always seemed like he was about to speak. He did it mostly with his eyes. Very intense. Right then he wanted me to get out of bed.
            It was our first morning in this perfect dream of a house. I had made a point of buying out in the middle of nowhere, America. The romance of the remote and mysterious had called me there.
Chase was a dusty little town still peopled by a few store keepers and such. Just what I was looking for! Plenty of sunshine. No traffic. It was darn near to being a ghost town.
            Also, I was looking for cacti in the front yard. And I had them. Those small ones with pads. Not the Saguaro unfortunately.
            Remembering suddenly the little cactus clusters out in front, I leapt up, as Fred had intended, and ran out to sit on my porch in my nightgown.
            Fred and I sat on the porch steps watching morning approach. First the sun lit the distant hills, then light raced across the land to splash against the few buildings visible on Main Street from our vantage.
            “This house you bought is haunted, Terry,” said Fred. “You know that right?”
            “What makes you think that?” I asked Fred. He looked at me and then turned away. No comment. A slight breeze ruffled his orange fur. I know what they say about orange tomcats, but Fred was neither stupid nor combative, so far.
            I gazed happily at the front yard of the huge old house we had just moved into. It was just desert ground. If there had ever been a lawn here it had died long ago. Long enough for these cacti to flourish here. It was so perfect.
            We were located on the very outskirts of Chase, right next to fenced pasture. If I was lucky, I would get to watch cattle. Along this tan and dusty street there were four other old houses of similar vintage, with great wraparound porches and second stories. Mine was painted white. No. 7, 2^nd Ave., Chase. AZ.
            While we were sitting there a small owl, just little, like a little brown and speckled jug with wings lit on the nearest pad of catus. It settled itself into that perfect owl posture. Looking straight at me, it winked one eye.
            “Who goes there?” said Mr. Owl. Then, message delivered, he took off.
            “See?” said Fred, looking back in my direction. People say cats show no expression in their faces. These people just haven’t been around.
            “See what? A random talking owl doesn’t mean the house is haunted!” I told him.
            A rather owlish pun I thought, on the owl’s part.
            “I’m going in to make breakfast, Fred. You coming?” I opened the door, holding it for Fred who walked in as if he owned the place. I stood aside and then closed the big old heavy door. Fred walked across the dark wooden planks heading for the kitchen. I had almost no furniture, so the room was echoey and huge. The walls were white painted plaster, but still the effect was shadowy, dim and cool.
            Another good thing about this old house was the size of the kitchen. It’s funny how they used to build. The kitchen was very large, but without a lot of built in storage. Of course, when this house was built, there had been no electric power to it, let alone electric gadgets and appliances. It was fine with me Fred and I don’t need a lot of gadgets. I hadn’t brought much with me anyhow. I sold and gave away everything left in my parent’s place, then I sold the property itself.
            The centerpiece of the room was a heavy wooden table capable of seating at least eight around it. Judging by the size of the house and the number of bedrooms upstairs, I thought it entirely possible that it had seated eight at one time.
            Though no one had lived here in years, the last of the last owners having died, and with no one inheriting, everything worked, after a few phone calls. I wasn’t sure about getting internet out here, but there had to be a way.
            The stove and the fridge were that rounded white style dating from the 50s, but they worked fine, once the power was on. In fact, in some ways those old things, heavy and stolid, were better than the more disposable versions made now.
            There was a short length of countertop, covered with green marbled linoleum. Fred hopped up there to watch me cook. Fred eats just about everything I eat. He’s not good with salad.
            There was an old fashioned sink, heavy and deep, with a nice window over it, facing east. The morning sun came blasting in, lighting up the whole room. It searched into the glass doored cabinet where I had stashed my dishes and cooking paraphernalia.
            I yawned. That sun light made me sleepy.
            We had shipwrecked eggs and yogurt. I had coffee. Fred had water. Then I washed up. Thankfully, the water heater worked too. It was a fine morning.
            “Thanks, Terry,” Fred said. I let him eat on the table. It’s okay. He’s not messy and it’s only us.
            The bathroom tucked at the back of the main floor was also enormous by modern standards. The floor was tiled in black and white octagons. The tub was enameled cast iron. The enamel was worn through on the bottom. Not a big deal. Very nice, indeed.
            Fred found a sunny spot to sleep in and I got into that big tub for the first time. No showers for Terry around here!
            Wrapped in my big robe, I padded across the hall to the main bedroom. It had a twelve foot high ceiling and was lit by an ornate hanging light fixture, which cast a glamorous golden light, after I had put new bulbs in it, that is.
            There was a small built in closet. These people didn’t have a lot of extra clothing apparently. In the middle of the floor was my futon, very authentically Japanese style, so it was right on the floor.
            In the middle of the futon, there in the middle of the floor, on top of my rumpled Japanese quilt lay a tossed dozen or so of white and pink roses, still cool to the touch, with drops of water on them. I know this to be so, my trembling hand reached out to touch them in disbelief.
            “Oh no. No way. This is not possible…”
            Why was Fred always right?

Good Sunday Morning!

 Well.

I went looking.

But I think Ralph and family,

were tucked safely up in their home clearing.

But, I feel like they were near.

Anyhow.

I know he would like you

to have a wonderful Sunday,

and to not worry about anything,

at all.

🤍

May I Read You A Story?

         I thought it might be fun to read from the Arizona book for you. These are Chapters 50 and 51, having to do with that sneaky character, Coyote, and his attempts to acquire the Golden Frog.

        So, it's mostly an open thread for a Saturday in February, 2025.

       🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🌵🐺🌵🌵

 

Just a Valentine's Day Greeting!

 Happy Valentine's Day!

🤍 Love and Roses to You 🤍

❤ ✯

What I Didn't Tell The Buckeye Bigfoot Lady

 

🤍A Silver Birch Tree.🤍

Perhaps it was for dramatic effect that I told the Buckeye Bigfoot lady, Nance, that I never met the Sasquatch baby or his mother ever again. It seemed like a good way to end the story, though that other writer, Victor, is drawing his story out into a series and with a cliffhanger too!
This is how the tale should have gone.
Perhaps you remember the story we posted on Thanksgiving giving a short history of Ralph’s antecedents? His own parents were called Earnest and Mary Louise, out of sheer puckishness. Their proper Saslingua names are lost to history. 
A bit of Earnest and Mary Louise’s lore that I must include now is where they settled when they came to the PNW. This pair seemed to have a preference for second growth timber. The light is better in those forests, more things grow on the ground than in the severe depths of the Douglas firs. Mary Louise was fond of berries and mushrooms. The berries must have sunlight. As for hunting, I’m not sure what you could catch out there, except for mountain beavers, or maybe some sort of birds. There were pheasants back then. There were no rivers nearby, so fishing locally was out.
In this environment there are also plenty of saplings to weave into shelters. There was lots of grass too. It was a rather easy life for them, if not very heroic or glamorous.
So, they settled within walking distance, for a Sasquatch, of the little place in the woods where my sibs and I grew up. There, they raised their eight children, the eldest  being Ralph, who was born to rule, albeit with a kind and gentle hand.
Mary Louise was fond of the same solitary birch tree that I liked. She was out there with her first young one the day I met them. She liked to peel some of that white bark off of the trunk and take it home. I don’t know what she did with it. But it is pretty, and a person could draw little drawings on it, if they had the notion to do so. Of course, I did that very thing with birch bark too.
So, Mary L. was busy, and baby got to snooping around and found my sleeping teenaged self. So, yes, that baby was Ralph, though his mama didn’t call him that, of course.
I barely could believe, later in the cold light of day, that I had met them. So, I didn’t expect to see them again. But it wasn’t that cut and dried. Somehow they were “around,” though seeing them was hit and miss.
My parents had a lot of raspberry bushes, in a double row, near the forest. It was a little bit of a battle to manage to harvest enough berries to do much with them. Someone always seemed to have gotten there first. Who could it be? Sometimes I saw him out there. Very briefly. He didn’t stay long. Year by year, he grew, until I’m sure he felt too large to be caught in the berry bushes. He knew I wouldn’t tell on him, but what if my brother or sisters or even my parents saw him? What then?
We always grew corn, pole beans, summer squash and tomatoes, plus potatoes. I’ve mentioned that the kids next door were American Indians, and the littlest girl liked to raid the corn rows. She would eat the corn raw out there in the rows! But, I am sure she wasn’t the only one doing that. Maybe they were both excited to unwrap one of my Indian corn ears? I sure enjoyed that esthetic experience myself.
I don’t know what the Forest people ate in the winter. It might be something to look into.
It was a kind of happy co-habitation. My parents, with their heads in the “real world,” never suspected a thing.
It was right around that time that they started tearing down the near forest, to build condos on the other side of the fence. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that done but it’s quite a process. Nobody harvested these trees for anything, not even firewood. They just bulldozed them into great piles and burnt them. When the workers and drivers of the dozers left at night, we kids and probably, after dark Ralph too, climbed in those piles, using them for jungle gyms.
Once those piles were gone, they built condos. 
I think this is when Earnest and Mary Louise took their tribe way uphill into the National Forest. It was also then that our paths separated. It was then that I saw him no more for many years.
So, when Ralph was about fourteen years old, Earnest and Mary Louise began to feel crowded by humans and new building projects in their habitual areas. They lined the kids up single file between themselves, with Mary Louse last in line and walked to the woods out behind Darrington, which was a pretty scary place back then. It was a roughneck town full of loggers and big trucks and a couple of lumber yards. They avoided the place and went on uphill. 
Those were Ralph’s years in the wilderness. The family lived as their people had always lived, with no interaction with human people, except maybe an occasional sighting. They sure didn’t hang around with us back then.
Ralph never talked about those years much. It was like without the English language at that time, he didn’t have much to say about that time. He told me later, after I started writing for the paper in town, that none of them had ever tasted cooked meat, or salt, or any sort of bread. They did eat fruits and vegetables when they could get them. They also dug up roots. He didn’t inform me as to which roots are edible. Sometimes they ate, like their remote cousins, tender leaves and shoots. He said he thought they may have been stronger back then. Earnest could pick up and throw a river rock that weighed what we would call around five hundred pounds.
They slept in big nests made under whatever shelter they could manage. Ten of them made quite a group. They stayed warm just from body heat all together. Caves and rocky overhangs were always preferred to the lean to shelters people sometimes find out in the wilds even today.
Ralph said his parents could vanish and all that, but that like it was a natural physical reaction. It wasn’t as intentional as when he does it. He never saw his dad or mom in the air, that didn’t happen with them. Maybe they just hadn’t thought of it, and he laughed a bit.
“You know, Millicent, I feel like I am looking back into an old dream when we talk about these things. It doesn’t seem real now. Is that good?” said Ralph. “I’ve only seen my father once in years. He was very remote. He never said a word; he just watched me. I think my mother has gone on; I don’t feel her presence anymore.”
“Do you ever see your brothers or sisters,” I asked him.
“Not much. They all live much further north. Some of them have gone Canadian on me!” 
“What a fate!” I said, giggling.
“So, Ralph, what’s the most important part of your life, so far?”
“Oh, Millicent! You know the answer! My life was like a baby paddling in shallow water until Ramona made sure I saw her, because she knew what was what. All the slippery pieces of my mind and life fell right into place in the moonlight by the eddy in a river. You’ve heard this story, Milly!”
“I have, yeah. Maybe I just like picturing it,” I said, pouring him another big cup of coffee. I have learned to bring a couple of big thermoses of coffee when I interview Ralph. He is more verbose when full of coffee.
“So, Ralph, what did your parents feed you kids back then, before cooking and hanging around human people. I mean in the winter, when there were no gardens to raid? I can’t imagine what would be edible in the woods in the winter. Maybe I’m not thinking about this right,” I said.
“Oh, we ate whatever animals we could catch. Once we moved up into the National Forest, we had deer. There were pheasants and some other nice edible birds. We had fish all the time. They are easy for even the very young to chew. Roots and shoots. Summer was much easier. A person can live on leaves if they keep at it,” said Ralph.
“Did I ever tell you, Ralph, that I met you long ago? Do you have any memory of a little house and garden with a mom and dad and four kids, the oldest being a girl?” I asked him. “You were just a little guy. We had a nap together in the woods by that white birch tree your mom liked.”
“I don’t remember the nap in the woods, Milly. But I do remember the little house and the raspberries and the corn and the family there. I remember the kids. I remember the big sister best of all because she was always keeping an eye on me. You didn’t tell on me though, did you?”
“No, Ralph, we have been friends for a long time. We lost each other for some time, but here we are! Drinking coffee and talking about the old days.”
“Thanks for the coffee. We have a hard time getting the stuff at home, but that’s okay. It makes a nice treat once in a while. I guess I better ramble. Ramona likes me to come home before dark and she is making dinner! See you soon!”
“Hey, man, give Ramona my love, and tell her thanks for letting you come talk to me. Love to Twigg and Cherry too! They must be getting so big by now.”
With that, he hopped out of the Escalade, my moving office, and took off downhill. We had been parked up on Green Mountain, watching the sky. Sometimes you see interesting stuff up there, mostly after dark. But sometimes before dark too.
After he left, I just sat there and finished off my coffee, looking down the mountainside toward the Sound. You can actually see the salt water from up there. It’s quite a vista.
I was thinking about this interview. Would I write it up for the paper? I finally decided not to. I would just keep this one under my hat. 
I drove home as it was getting dark under all those trees, but I know the road pretty well. No problem.