I don’t blame her for panicking.
Six months earlier, I still lived in the white farmhouse outside Cedar Hollow, Iowa.
It had a red barn, a wraparound porch, and the same kitchen table where my husband, Nolan, had read the paper every morning for forty-three years.
After he died, everyone kept telling me how lucky I was to have that house.
“Such a beautiful place.”
“So many memories.”
“You’ll feel close to him there.”
But after a while, memories can get heavy.
The house stopped feeling like a home and started feeling like a museum where I was the last dusty exhibit.
Nolan’s boots still sat by the back door.
His coffee mug stayed in the cabinet.
His chair remained angled toward the window, like he might come in from the barn any second and ask what smelled so good.
But he never did.
So I sat in my recliner every evening with the television talking to itself, watching the sun disappear behind the cornfields, feeling myself disappear right along with it.
I had driven a school bus for thirty-one years.
I had memorized every gravel road, every child’s stop, every parent who waved from the porch in slippers.
I had broken up arguments, handed out tissues, kept spare mittens in winter, and once drove twenty-two children home through a snowstorm while praying under my breath the whole way.
I was not fragile.
But loneliness will make even strong people quiet.
One Tuesday morning, I woke up, made one cup of coffee, stared at the empty chair, and said out loud, “Briar, you are not dead yet.”
Then I did something everyone called foolish.
I sold the farmhouse.
