Yesterday was my hard day. I felt as if I were suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. I went through the motions of sorting my sock drawers in search of the warmer ones, but mostly I just wanted to get back in bed. “What just happened?” It’s been so intense for so long, to be back where everything is familiar and calm and the deadline of the sale doesn’t loom, I’m at a loss, too.
When we arrived about 8:30 the night before, James and Lily proudly showed us room to room all the work they’ve done to integrate the two other households into this one. The house is now more eclectic, with furniture and things from all the periods of the last 150 years, and much fuller than I’ve come to like. We’ll have to do another culling, I suppose, but we’ll have to do it now or we’ll all get used to it this way. I don’t want the house to lose its beauty, to become like Pop’s house -- an oddity, a kind of house freak show.
At least we didn’t bring a hornet’s nest to hang from the ceiling! But it seems as if we’ve brought everything else and James has diligently, generously found a place for them -- Judi’s ornate antique hall tree is in the front hall, the Mission desk is between the two sofas in the living room, the colored glass and floral cake plate have taken the place of the brown plates on the open shelves in the kitchen. 15 boxes of papers and photos await our sorting, stacked in the garage. James even bought a new freezer so Judi could bring the frozen venison from last year’s Klarwin deer.
James and Lily had arranged Judi’s suite upstairs so it was ready for her, so she felt welcomed into our home, with her pictures on the walls, the clothes she had left here already tucked in the cubicles in her closet. Over the desk they set up for me in the kitchen hang two photographs and two water colors of the farm and the 1958 C.W. Brown Lime Spreading calendar with “ratbate” written in pencil and circled on Sat, Dec. 6, and five sets of New Year’s resolutions on the back.
The burden of the farm will begin to dissipate and we will remember the beauty, the delight of growing up there, the warm feelings. The last few weeks have stimulated my interest in our family’s history. I want to preserve the time to learn more about that. Judi, in looking for the key to her safe this morning, dug in the crate of old coins and I saw for the the first time the twin gold watches that must have been given to our great aunts, Alma and Elizabeth. Alma’s was worn from use, Lizzie’s looked as if it were brand new with her initials elaborately carved on the back and the long gold chain still intact. I want to know more about Lizzie. We know Alma was a schoolteacher and lived in Judi’s house, married to Walter Kirk. But I don’t know what happened to her sister, Lizzie. I’m hoping I’ll learn more from the box marked “old letters and farm deeds.”
The closing went well. All that work over the past five months since Pop died culminated in a three-hour intense meeting of the lawyers, the two Amish couples, and Judi. They sat at Judi’s kitchen table and pored over the endless pile of papers the title lawyer had brought for them to sign. David S. marveled at the number of pens on the table.
Amos and his wife Katy did their paperwork first. She put her bonnet and he put his straw hat on the table next to Judi’s microwave. One of their sons, Inis, is married to the Stolzfus’s daughter, Lavina. Another brother will be marrying another of David’s daughters in early December. Inis and his older brother had come this morning so Inis’ brother, who is farming their father’s farm, could look over what his family is buying and offer his advice. I shook hands with both sons -- handsome young men with big smiles and firm handshakes who looked me straight in the eye. They went off to look at Pop’s side of the farm while their parents were signing.
David and his wife, Malinda, speaking to each other in Pennsylvania Dutch, went straight upstairs to see what Judi had left, and to make some copies on Judi’s printer. They were happy Judi was leaving the printer and Carl’s old desk. They want the desk to be the teacher’s desk in the new school house David has helped build. We aren’t sure how they’ll be able to use the printer in the future without electricity.
We all shook hands at the end, but the Amish couples politely refused to have any pictures taken of them. I drove Malinda home to fix her children lunch while the others walked quickly down the lane with their lunches in a plastic cooler. They planned to spend a couple more hours looking more closely at what they had just purchased.
Malinda gave me two jars of apple sauce and a jar of her canned peaches to thank Lily for the toy horses and cows Lily had left for the children. Malinda and David said to please thank Lily because “that little boy, Benial, won’t stop playing with them. He is trying to milk the cow and is bringing water to the horse. Yesterday, we couldn’t get him to come to supper.”
Judi and I had been up since five packing the car, loading the cooler with the contents of her freezer. We’d walked over just as the sun was coming up to turn the heater on in Pop’s house because the weather forecast called for freezing rain and snow. Getting out of there just in time. We took a picture of the “Beware of Bull” sign and the collection of tetherall parts in the basement. I’m afraid no one will know what they are and they’ll just be sent to metal recycling.
Charlie drove in on his motorcycle just as we were finishing up signing some papers Judi’s lawyer and financial adviser had brought about the estate. Judi and I both hugged him goodbye and waved out both sides of Pop’s car as we drove off to make a bank deposit and drop off the cable box in Rising Sun on our way to the Interstate.
Not sad then, mostly relieved, that everything we’d been working toward had been accomplished. Check, check, check, on the to-do list.
We finally lost it about two hours later as the stress, lack of sleep and hunger set in. We stopped at an Applebee’s to get something to eat. My salad was taking too long, so Judi offered me some of her food. As Judi pushed her little bowl of chili across the table at me so I’d stop spilling bits, I yelled, “Stop it, stop it!” cause I thought she was forcing me to eat more. She went quiet and then started to cry.
I was thrown back to our childhood when Judi, feeling misunderstood, would press her finger so hard on the page that the tip would go white from lack of blood, and I would get mad cause she was acting like I was stupid.
We were five years old, sitting in the restaurant, faced with an unknown future, together again in a way we haven’t been for more than 40 years. It took us an hour or so back on the road to get back to the present, reassuring each other that at least we know now how to talk through such moments.
We stopped again for food and the caffeine of a soft drink so we could stay awake. When we finally arrived we were thrilled to see in our headlights the Klarwin dinner bell already perched on a pedestal next to the driveway at 451 Lakeshore Lane.
We are hopeful this will work.
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