The Camper on the Eighty That Was Mine

What the law would have let me do

Bill Dunn sat me down in his office after the funeral and explained something I had not known.

In Iowa, he said, a surviving spouse does not have to take what the will gives her. She can elect against it.

“You could take a third of the real estate Harlan owned while you were married,” Bill said, sliding a paper across the desk.

“Or you could take the right to live in the house for the rest of your life. You’d have four months from the notice to decide.”

I asked him if it would mean a court proceeding.

He said it would mean filings, and hard feelings, and very possibly Darrin selling ground he could not afford to sell in order to buy me out.

I went home and sat at Ann’s kitchen table and thought about it for one evening. Then I let the four months go by.

I never told Darrin I had the choice, and I never told him I had decided not to use it.

The house was his in the will, plain and legal. I was not going to drag Harlan’s boy through a courthouse over the house his mother died in.

Some things you can win and still lose, and that was one of them.

Besides, I had the 80. The 80 was the one thing in my married life that had always been mine and nobody else’s.

The 80 acres at the end of the lane

The lane runs a quarter mile south from the house, gravel all the way, down to where the old Ferris place stood before it burned in the sixties.

At the end of it are eighty acres of rolling ground, a creek bottom, and a stand of bur oaks older than anybody I know.

Old Mrs. Ferris sold it to me in 2010 on a contract, when she went into the care center in Corning.

She did not want it going to the big operators. She wanted, she told me, a woman who would leave the oaks alone.

The deed was in my name only. Harlan insisted on that. He said the farm was his and Ann’s and Darrin’s, and this ought to be something that was only mine.

He said it the night we signed, and I thought it was the most romantic thing a man had ever said to me.

I made the payment every month out of my teacher’s check for eight years. When I retired at sixty-two, I made it out of my IPERS pension.

Sixteen years of payments in all. I wrote the last check the summer before Harlan died, and he took me out to supper to celebrate.

About sixty acres of it was in alfalfa and brome. Every one of those sixteen years, Darrin cut the hay off it for his father’s cows.

Three cuttings most summers, and in a good fall, one more after the first hard freeze.

I never asked him for a dime. Neither did Harlan. You do not charge family, was how we both saw it.

The cows were Harlan’s cows, and Harlan was my husband, and that was the end of the arithmetic as far as I was concerned.

There was one more thing at the end of that lane. Harlan had a used fifth-wheel camper, thirty-two feet long, that he bought for deer season and the State Fair.

He kept it parked under the oaks, and years ago he ran an electric pole down there and a frost-free hydrant off the old Ferris well.

He used to say that camper was the only place on earth nobody could find him.

I used to carry his supper down there in November, and we would eat it at the little fold-down table and listen to the wind go through the oaks.