The Realtor Who Put Down Her Camera

How we got there

I need to back up, because you will want to know how a woman ends up hearing about her own house being sold from a girl she taught to thread a bobbin.

My name is Wanda Ruble. I am sixty-six years old. I drove a school bus for thirty-one years for our county schools, route nine, out the gravel roads and back.

I led the 4-H sewing club for twenty-two of those years. I have taught, by my count, something over two hundred children to sew a straight seam and press it flat before they sewed the next one.

My husband Ray built this house with his brother in 1983, red brick, three bedrooms, on three acres outside town in east-central Indiana. Ray passed six years ago this May. His heart, in the barn, quick.

I have lived alone in it since. Not lonely, exactly. Ada is a quarter mile down the road and has been my neighbor for forty years. I have church on Sunday and my garden in summer.

Then on the twenty-second of January, I went out to get the mail in a pair of house shoes, which I know better than to do, and I found the one patch of ice the sun had missed.

I lay at the end of my own driveway for about twenty minutes before the propane truck came by. The driver was a young man named Jeff, and he called the ambulance and put his own coat over me.

The hip was broken clean through at the neck. They put in a partial replacement the next morning. The surgeon said I was lucky, that at my age it could have been much worse, and that I would walk again.

He also said it would take time. Eight to twelve weeks, he said, before I was really steady, and longer than that before I trusted it.

Garrett drove down from Muncie that night. He sat by my bed at the hospital in the dark and held my hand, and I will tell you the truth, I was glad to see him. I was scared.

Garrett is forty. He went through a divorce two years ago that took most of what he had. His wife kept the house in Muncie, and he pays support for their two kids, a boy and a girl.

He was renting a room over a tire shop. I knew that much. I did not know how far behind he was on everything else, and I did not ask, because a mother learns not to.

The day before they moved me to the rehab center, a woman from the business office came up with a stack of papers about my insurance and my Medicare and the rehab place, and my head was swimming from the pain medicine.

Garrett said, “Mom, let me handle the bills while you heal. You shouldn’t have to think about any of this right now.”

And he brought a power of attorney form, a financial one, already filled out with his name as my agent. The hospital had a notary who came around on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was a Tuesday.

I signed it. I want you to know I signed it with my eyes open, as open as they could be on that medicine. I trusted my son to pay the electric bill and argue with the insurance company. That was what I thought I was signing.

He moved into his old bedroom the week I came home from the rehab center. “Just till you’re back on your feet,” he said, carrying in two duffel bags and a laundry basket full of shoes.