Ghosts

When we were kids, the whole house was ours. This may not sound like much, but since we came from a tract house in California, a house in Kingston with a BASEMENT, a SUN ROOM, TWO FIREPLACES (one in the formal dining room, one in the sun room--and oh, that one? It was a huge stone one), a formal dining room with a chandelier...where my mother died, one night in 1972. So...sorry if I sounded like Ms Real Estate there for a minute, I actually do have some deeper connection to it than that...anyway, we had come from California in 1969, for IBM, aka I've Been Moved, where my father worked. We had lived in a little modern tract house with a huge back yard (2 lemon trees, 2 plum trees, two apple trees, a veritable Noah's Ark of fruit trees...and a patio, with a sliding glass door--so 1963!) and now we had moved to this 1928 art deco /art moderne kit house.

At some point, we had explored everywhere we could possibly explore, and we found a crawl space under the house. In the crawl space was...Dr Stern's silver headed walking stick. He had lived in the house 1928-1952, and I always wondered what happened to the walking stick, so the other day, I asked Hal.

"I put it back where we found it, " he said. "It needed to stay with the house."

As does some tiny spirit of my mother.