The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

The Summer I Almost Talked Myself Out Of

I live alone on sixty acres outside Springfield, Illinois, in the farmhouse my husband and I bought the year we married, the one I have not been able to make myself leave in the four years since he passed. Most days that is fine. I have the dog, the garden, the porch, and a phone that rings often enough that I do not feel forgotten. But a house built for a family of four gets very loud in its silence once it is down to one, and I had stopped admitting how loud, even to myself, until the summer my son’s children came to fill it.

I should say up front that I am fifty nine years old and I do not think of myself as an old woman yet, whatever my knees have to say about it. I still put up forty quarts of tomatoes every August. I still drive myself to the VFW fish fry on Fridays and to church on Sundays and to the feed store whenever the mood strikes, which out here counts as a full social calendar. What I did not have, most of the year, was noise. Good noise. The kind that comes from somebody else’s shoes on your stairs.

The Phone Call From Peoria

It was the first week of June when my son Lyman called from the house he and his wife keep outside Peoria, a little over three hours from me if the roadwork on I 55 behaves itself.

“We’re gutting the kitchen,” he said. “Down to the studs. It’s going to be dust and strangers with saws in that house for ten, maybe twelve weeks.” He paused the way he does when he wants something and does not want to sound like he is asking for it. “Would you take the kids for the summer? Not visit. Stay. The whole thing.”

I did not need to think about it, though I made a show of considering for his benefit, because a mother likes to feel that her son is asking a favor and not being rescued from one.

“Bring them Saturday,” I said.