Writing Someone Else's Story

Moving into someone else’s house and making it your home feels like sitting down at a keyboard to finish a story someone else started writing.  Except that all you have to work with is the very last chapter they wrote – the leftover stuff you see today.  You can only guess what those initial chapters contained.

You look for clues that might suggest a motivation or an explanation.  You try to piece together a history from tactile bits of information like the dated color of an old toilet or the design of a windowsill that looks out of place; you recall details in the mortgage documents: names and dates, property lines, easements; or progressive lines scratched into molding marking the growth of the boys that used to share your daughter’s room. 

The door jamb needs repainting but we've held off, preserving recent history.

You find that with some of those leftover plot devices you want to honor its history and build it into your part of the narrative.  But you also discover that the plot needs to move forward and things have to change. 

One of my college professors said that the key to writing good fiction is to make normal people do things that normal people wouldn’t normally do.  In this story, I will have to be the one doing the things that normal people wouldn’t do in order to make it my story, my home. 

I will have to take the workshop that was built by the man who first bought this house and who fathered six daughters and turn it into a game room, or a cigar lounge, or a part-time gym . . . all of these being things that might make that man roll over in his grave.  

The shop has been a catch-all for things without a place inside.

I will have to take the shed that was put here by the last couple so they could store their lawn mower and turn it into a potting shed that will do a better job at setting the scene now that a gardener has come to live here. 

There's room to move around in here and use this as a potting shed
but only  after I find a better home for the mower and my garden cart.

My former garden was filled with potted plants.  I now have dozens of pots, barrels and containers that are unused and need to be written into the landscape or deleted entirely.

I will continue to edit out the trees that don’t belong and the plants that were only meant to be passing background characters. 

For now I have chosen to leave the mysterious lines of concrete in the yard because they say something to me about the history of this place and provide a framework for what might come next.  Maybe these solid relics will become the obstacle my character will have to overcome, or the boundary markers in a child's game of tag.  

These concrete lines span the width of our yard.  I wonder if they once marked the edge of our property.

Other sections of concrete baffle me entirely.  For what were these intended so many years ago?

I will leave the vegetable patch where it is even though it is no longer the sunniest place in the yard because I think it needs to be where it is for reasons I don’t understand myself.  Its weedy state could be the foundation for a tale of a rebirth that could parallel my own life somehow. 

Very gradually, I imagine, the days will come when the things I see will say more about my family’s presence here than the ghosts knocking around this place.  And eventually, many years from now, I’ll come to that last chapter and even though all the stories before it will go missing, I hope the next person picks up on our clues and writes the next chapter and does the things I wouldn't do.

A Ghost Story

My friend Calvin, author of the blog, “A Thistle in My Sensitive Area”, wrote a hair-raising post about a voice he heard while working in his office.  This being Halloween, I thought I’d share a ghost story of my own even though it has nothing to do with gardening.  

* * * * * *

Like many kids do, I grew up spending a week of my summer vacation at a camp.  In my case, it was Camp Spalding which is tucked away in the southern edge of the Selkirk Mountain Range in northeastern Washington State.  The main part of the camp consisted of a rustic lodge, seven cabins a couple outbuildings and about 230 acres of wilderness.  It was all snuggled in between a serene little lake and Grayback Mountain. 

One of my cabins on top of the mountain overlooking the lake.  Camp Spalding is in the background.

It was an important place for me because it was where I felt most like me.  I felt accepted, challenged, encouraged; all the things that a good camp should foster in kids.  And because of that I wanted to spend more and more time there as I grew up.  By the time I was 16 I was spending most of my summer there either as a camper or as a cabin counselor for the younger kids.

When I started college I worked on staff as the rock climbing and high ropes course instructor during the summers.  During the school year, when extra money was in short supply, I would drive up to Camp on Saturday mornings to look after the grounds while Bud, the full-time caretaker, enjoyed his weekend.  Spending my weekends up there was hard.  It was hard because I was in college and I wasn’t hanging out with my friends back in the dorms.  But it was also hard because it felt like a different place without a hundred kids running around and without the camaraderie of my co-staffers.  It was lonely and cold. 

I snapped this photo of snow-covered trees one weekend when I went back to Camp with my wife in 2007.

Some weekends people would use the camp as a retreat center.  Those weekends weren’t too bad because even though I didn’t know any of the people it was nice just having them around.  But most of the time it was just me and the dark quiet which was never quite as quiet as you’d think it would be.  There were always noises you couldn’t explain – at least not right away.  One noise, in particular, unnerved me.  It came from the lake, which was frozen solid.  I didn’t know what to think of the low moaning I heard.  “What the hell is that?” I asked myself.  I thought something was out there, on the ice, in trouble.  But the sound was coming from everywhere it seemed like.  It was coming from beneath the ice maybe.  Whatever it was, it just kept moaning.  The sound was both immense and quiet somehow. When Bud came by to check on me I asked him about the noise.  He laughed at me in a way that let me know he’d been there and done that.  “It’s just the ice shifting” he told me. 

Like most spooky occurrences, there was a scientific explanation.  Although I am not strictly a scientifically oriented person, I appreciate the comfort science provides.  When it can.

There was a weekend at Camp where I needed to be up there on Friday night to get the facility ready for a retreat starting on Saturday.  After I finished splitting logs for fires, mopping the lodge floor, and turning on the heat in the cabins, I went back to the lodge and lit a fire in the fireplace.  I had some reading to do for school so I put in REM’s “Automatic for the People” and put my feet up on the hearth.  In spite of the loneliness, it was all pretty nice.  Good music, an engrossing book, a strong fire, and an unlimited supply of hot chocolate at my disposal.  And then I felt something.  Nothing touched me but I felt something all the same.  I felt I wasn’t alone anymore.  I spun my head to look and expected to see Bud or maybe someone from the retreat that had arrived early.  But I saw, instead, a woman dressed from head to toe in gray walking across the lodge floor and into the kitchen behind me.  And then she was gone. 

Alphonse performing at a "talent show."
The fireplace behind him is where I sat on the night in question.

If I’m completely honest, to this day I still question if I actually saw what I thought I saw.  Part of me feels like I made it up or that I’ve embellished it in my memory as I thought back on it.  When it comes to ghosts, I’m more or less an agnostic.  I didn’t tell this story to anyone for a few weeks.  But I could never forget that feeling I had in the lodge that night.

Back at school I found myself in a conversation with a friend, Angie, who had spent the last few summers working at Camp with me.  We talked about everything those days so I opened up to her about the story, prefacing it with “you won’t believe me . . . Heck, I don’t really believe me, but . . .”  When I got to the gist of it, she started shaking her head.  “Stop, stop,” she pleaded.  “Did you talk to Joni about this?  Did she tell you to tell me this story?”   I hadn’t spoken to Joni, one of the cooks at camp, about the gray lady.  I hadn’t spoken to anyone about it.  But Joni had also confided in Angie that she had seen what appeared to be a nun, dressed in gray, walking through the lodge. 

I had been willing to doubt my own vision that night.  It seemed reasonable that my eyes were just tired from reading too much in a dimly lit lodge.  It also seemed completely reasonable that a drafty window could have made me feel something behind me.  There were enough real-world/scientific variables that allowed me to write it off as a weird occurrence.  But all that went out the window when I found out Joni had seen the same thing.  I don’t know how to explain that.



Camp Spalding shrouded in snow and silence.