Earth: 46 light years away – [at the breakfast table] Someone else’s home
While I am finishing breakfast, I look around the kitchen. It is an old house, built sometime around 1920 when this part of St. Louis was a tree lined suburb. I am still not used to the ornamental moldings and small stain glass window that give the space a church like atmosphere as the sun rises in the east. Although, I am sitting at the same kitchen table that we had in our last place, an apartment above Grandma and Grandpa, the same toaster oven is sitting next to me on the counter, the same lime green refrigerator is humming across the room, I still have an that unsettling feeling I am in someone else’s home.
We moved in just a few weeks ago. My parents thought the best time to move would be summer vacation so my sister and I could finish out the school year at our old school and still have some to adjust to the surroundings. Packing up the old place was not difficult as my sister and I shared one small room. And as the apartment the top floor of my grandparents house there was no need to be too thorough as any toys or clothes we didn’t want to take we could just leave for Grandma to tidy and put in the basement.
My sister and I were really excited to get the chance to have our new rooms. In early summer when our parents we making a final decision, they brought us for a tour. We could not believe the amount of space we would now have. My sister and I have rooms on the ground floor. My room is adjacent the back yard and had two large windows. That faced the south. I thought this is great as I could even see a patch sky along the ecliptic. This allows me to set up my telescope and view the moons of Jupiter. My parent refurbished half of the attic to be their bedroom. What’s more the large basement is also refurbished and is a play room. On the first floor in addition too the our rooms is the kitchen the dinning room and the main living room, with a large bay window and a fireplace.
This is a rather common floor plan for houses in the United States at the time. But for my sister and I, it was the fist time we have ever lived in a house with a fireplace or dinning room. And the size of our rooms even allowed for a the head of a bed to be placed against the wall and we could enter the bed from either side, something impossible in the small bed room in our apartment.
That larger part of the summer we were either packing up our stuff or helping tidy up the new house preparing for moving day. It was the time we spent tidying up the new place that gave me the feeling that this was someone else’s house. Our parents trying to keep us from being under foot while painting the walls, tasked us with cleaning the garage. The garage was a wooden single care garage with an open gable roof. It was at least twice as large as the flat roof brick shed at our Grandparents house. To our child like minds it seemed more like a large doll house than a garage. It sat at the right corner of the backyard. A narrow concrete path lead from the back door off the kitchen to the garage door. My sister and I followed that path to the windowed door. Through the dirty windows and pale curtains you could just make out the opposite wall. My sister was holding the skeleton key that Mother had given us. The real estate agent had left the key. My mother trusted my sister with the key as I was likely to drop it. As per my mothers instructions we we to sort through the boxes of stuff and through out anything that wasn’t useful. Our mother confided that the previous owner died before she could clean anything out and no family had come to claim anything. We asked if that meant that the old lady died in the house. My mother did not give us a straight answer and went back to taping the door frames and preparing for painting.
We regarded our task with solemn importance. But I also had dreams of finding some antique treasure which I could sell for cash to by the computer of my dreams. My sister handed me the key and I put it in the lock. Wont budge!
“righty tighty lefty loosey”, my sister chants.
“I’m doing it right”
“let me try”
She struggled just like me.
“I’m going to get some WD-40”.
As I turn to leave we here a crash from inside the garage. We both instinctively run to the concrete ash pit and jump in, leaving the key in the door. The ash pit was a common feature of back yard in in the early 20th century. I was a squarish raised concrete receptacle about three feet high used to hold the waste from coal burning furnaces . By this time most had been taken out or converted into a large flower pot. Ours was mostly empty save for some twigs, leaves and two frightened children.
As we surveyed the the situation from our place of safety we heard another crash. Then suddenly the door opened and out spilled a large box of playbills.
We slowly left safety to inspect the box. We picked up the playbills by the hand fulls and looked at what to us was a window to the impossibly distant past of the 1930’s. We had never heard of the titles of the plays and the accompanying photos of women with wild hair gave us a strange disconnect to a distant time. We sat on the grass in the yard looking at the names from the playbills and one seemed to be constant. Mary Martha Landsdowne. We had not had not been told the name of the woman who lived here before, who died without moving her stuff, who had no family to take her possessions away, but my sister and I knew that her name must be Mary Martha Landsdowne.
From that time on we were sure that the garage and most likely the house too was haunted by the old lady. We were sure also that we didn’t get a straight answer out of our mother for this very reason. We sat for a while on the grass. Trying to pluck up some courage to finish this task. My sister argued that the ghost must still be in the garage. I tried to counter that the ghost abruptly left when the door suddenly opened. I also tried to make the argument that it was a friendly ghost. And we should go look at all the stuff in the garage. Here the dreams of the Vic 20 computer were driving me to find something of value.
“but don’t you think she’ll be angry if we through out her stuff.” my sister quite logically stated
“well if we don’t clean at all Mom and Dad will first punish us then through out all the stuff any way”
So we decided to compromise with each other and the dead. We would each make a piles of items that we thought were valuable and items that we thought the ghost would like to keep. We worked for hours and the as the sun started going down we had saved enough ghost things to fill one box and two boxes of what we thought were valuable antiques.
As I finish up my breakfast my sister comes in. It is her first day in the new school too. She does not seem too bothered by meeting new people. Anyway we have at least both met one new person/ghost Mary Martha Landsdown.