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I Brake for Ghosts
I admit it. Moving to a ghost town during the height of the Covid pandemic may not have been the best choice. It certainly wasn’t the obvious choice. It was one of those decisions cooked up out of hope and desperation, a recipe for survival with a sprinkle of hope thrown in. A very small sprinkle.
Within the space of a few months, most of our income was gone, along with our health insurance. What wasn’t gone was the mortgage… If we didn’t do something quickly, we imagined complete disaster.
What to do. What to do.
How about sell our house and use the profit to move all of our belongings across the country to a tiny town with a lot of history and no place to spend the money we didn’t have?
Our grandchildren lived out West, and I’d been frantic to see them. If we lived closer, I could visit them a lot more (once the pandemic subsided). With this in mind, we started scouring the Internet for affordable homes. Affordable for us meant that we could come up with the down payment and the monthly mortgage would be low.
We couldn’t get as close to the family as we hoped; they lived in areas where real estate had exploded. I know you’re thinking that real estate exploded everywhere. You’re mostly right. But at the beginning of the pandemic there were still a few places within a day’s drive of the kids where the fuse may have been lit, but hadn’t quite caught. These were in small towns, and they were mostly in the desert. Often they were mobile homes or condominiums with HOA’s that would drive our monthly expenses up too high, so most of these were eliminated. There were a few houses. All of them were small and in need of repair, but we weren’t afraid of the work.
We decided to take the leap. We chose the most remote of the locations, mostly because we loved old homes, and this was an old brick home, and the altitude was high, so we would still have snow (yes, to us this was a good thing!). The house was originally built as a parsonage for the handsome Methodist church adjacent to it.
The town was very quiet. It would make an excellent place to write.
And here we are.
It’s been an adjustment. For the first year we probably only spoke to a total of five other people in town. When we had to drive the 112 miles to the nearest town where we could get supplies, it was quite overwhelming to encounter people on the streets, in the stores. In Austin, the only people you saw were in the post office. You might imagine that was because of pandemic precautions, but I don’t think that was it. This is not a town that follows protocol. It is a town, however, that leaves you alone.
A local woman told one of our movers that our house had a ghost. “But don’t tell them,” she said. “They’ll find out soon enough.” I don’t know if anyone else in town thinks we have a ghost. If so, I suppose that could explain the lack of neighborly visits with casseroles in the early days we were here. The ghost lady is known locally, I’ve since learned, for her flights of fancy, so I don’t really think our house has a ghostly reputation. If we do have a ghost, I haven’t met him/her yet. To us, the house has a very serene vibe. Perhaps our ghost is a parson, or one of the parson’s family members. Perhaps he or she is a writer.
No problem. We were busy using up the remainder of the profit from our old house (a 1950-something cottage that we had renovated after we had renovated a 1920-something cottage… there was a 1940-something house in between that only needed a few tweaks) renovating our 1866 parsonage. These things always cost more than expected, even when you are doing the work yourself.
There were unexpected plumbing issues, for example. Do you have any idea how expensive a snake is? Not the slithery kind, you know, the kind the plumber brings to clean out your sewer pipes? They cost a lot. Plus, there was no plumber, at least not within 100 miles.
Then there’s the digging up of old pipes and putting in new ones… There’s the stripping of the drywall, which isn’t really drywall. It’s layers of wood and wallpaper, and even newspaper, which has been covering the brick walls since the house was built. There’s the painting. There’s knocking down the wood structure that was added in front of the house at some point in the last century, presumably to house automobiles. The one that blocked every ray of sunlight from entering the house.
Anyway, lots to do.
And then, gradually, during our second year here, we started venturing out of the house. I joined the church across the road. The Methodist church next door to us is being used for a community center these days, but the Episcopal church has continuously held worship services since its opening in 1878. My husband and I volunteered to paint the doors red, something the priest had been longing to have done and that we were more than well equipped to do, what with all of our home improvement practice. The effect was stunning.
We increased our walking distance each day, seeing a neighbor here and there, experiencing beautiful wild views, wildlife sightings, even stumbling upon a pet cemetery high up in the forest above town. The streets are still quiet and there are only a couple of businesses open, but we appreciate what we have. We’ve found that we love our route to visit the kids, long as it is, because it takes us through parts of the Eastern Sierra. Hopefully, some day soon, we will take the turn that leads to Yosemite.
And every day, I write.