It is hard getting used to – this being the old one in the Scott House. I came to that house as a baby in 1948 and it wasn’t bad. I didn’t realize it but the war was over and won and the country’s mood was pretty good out here in rural Indiana. The background of the land was the same – small town general store,  big old brick school house just north of us, a big garden with a patch of strawberries running right down the middle, the smells of woodsmoke and Grandma’s and Mother’s cooking.

My grandmother was almost 45 when Mother was born and her dad five years older. I came into a world that was a modernized turn of the century place with stories of sleigh rides and horses and buggies and sicknesses without antibiotics.Eisenhower wasn’t president yet and there were no interstates.

I had an aunt who was 18 years older than mother and an uncle who was 15 years older and cousins who were older.

It stayed that way for a long time. Then my uncle died and a couple of years later it was 1998  and I was 50. My aunt died around Christmas that year. My father became ill just after the next Christmas and died in four weeks. For a decade there was a lull; things were different but we didn’t talk about it. Last year Mother died.

It’s just me now. Every now and then it sneaks up on me and goes “Boo.”  I think it goes Boo because the effect is that it’s scary.

Well, soon, daylight will come and I guess I’ll do what my grandparents and parents did – keep on living my life until I too am somebody’s ghost.