The Little House Next Door
The green folder
Helen Vogel named me her power of attorney eleven years ago, the spring she turned seventy-three. Not Curt.
Me, the daughter-in-law, the nurse’s aide from the clinic who married into the family at twenty-three and never did learn to make lefse right.
I asked her about it at the time. We were sitting in her farm kitchen out on the township road, the one with the yellow linoleum and the Hamm’s beer clock that did not work, and she was cutting rhubarb for a pie.
“Curt feels things too hard,” she said. “He felt every day of his father. You feel things too, but you keep your hands moving. I want the one who keeps her hands moving.”
So we went to the lawyer in Glenwood and she signed the Minnesota short form, and I signed the part that says I accept, and the lawyer explained that a power of attorney is a duty, not a gift.
He said it twice. He said the money stays hers and gets spent on her and for her, and that I was to keep records like the state was going to read them someday.
There was a line on that form for gifts. Helen did not initial it. I remember the lawyer pointing to it and her shaking her head and saying, “Nobody needs a present from me while I’m alive. They can fight over the dishes after.”
For eleven years the folder sat in the closet and I did not touch it except to pay her property taxes when she forgot, and to call the electric co-op once when she let the bill slide two months.
She ran her own life on that farm, widowed, until she was eighty-two.
Then she started leaving the stove on. Then she drove to the Cenex in Starbuck for gas and could not find her way home, and a deputy who knew her from church followed her out to the farm with his lights off so she would not be scared.
That spring, she sold her last forty acres to the Johnson boy who farmed around her. It was slough and rock pasture, mostly, the kind of ground that floods in April and grows cattails and blackbirds.
He gave her two thousand an acre, which was fair for what it was, and she moved into our spare room.
Eighty thousand dollars went into her checking account at the bank in Glenwood. It was the last of the Vogel farm, the land Elmer’s grandfather broke with horses.
Helen kept the deposit slip in her housecoat pocket for a week and took it out to look at.