Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 57897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 289(@200wpm)___ 232(@250wpm)___ 193(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 289(@200wpm)___ 232(@250wpm)___ 193(@300wpm)
Moving back around to the kitchen, I was pleased to see it was as clean as I hoped it was. A strange smell was coming from the refrigerator, and I decided I would deal with that later. My aunt had been gone a couple of weeks by the time I got the notification about the property, and I could only guess at what had gone to rot in there.
Beside the kitchen was a dining room with boxes stacked high on the table. Two chairs had empty spaces in front of them, but the rest of the table was cluttered up. A beautiful China cabinet on one wall had glittery, pretty things in it, but they were blocked from sight by the stacks of totes and boxes all around the room.
Along one wall of the living room was a door, but the path to it was littered with fallen totes and boxes and just general stuff. It looked like the EMS guys had pushed their way through to that door and then back from it with something that didn’t fit in the thin path that was laid out through the other rooms.
I made my way across from the kitchen, my arms out for balance, and made it a minute or so later, a crashing sound behind me. I didn’t want to look at what it could be. Whatever it was, it was broken now.
I opened the door and found a bedroom, this time much more contained and less cluttered. There were boxes and bags, mostly of clothes still with tags on them, but there was a general neatness about it that, while cluttered, didn’t seem insane. The bed itself was still as it was left when my aunt was taken away.
A strange sadness came over me. I didn’t know this woman. I barely knew she existed, really. But she had lived here, and her final moments in her home, possibly her final moments on Earth, had been in that bed. The covers that were bundled up on the bottom, still tucked in on one side, were the same way she had tossed them, or they had been tossed by EMS. The bathroom light was on, and I realized she had probably done that herself. To give her light in the darkness. Or maybe just to feel less alone.
The last moments of my aunt were frozen in place here, and I was compelled to take a moment in memory of her. There were precious few pictures around, but the ones that were had two women in them, roughly the same age. My two aunts. They had lived on this land together, running the farm. Then one of them died, and the other was alone, here in this trailer. And then she died too.
It was somber, and briefly I just wanted to shut the door and turn away. To let that room stay as it was for a while, a shrine to the last moments of the aunt that lived in it. But that was silly, wasn’t it? She’d left it to me. She intended on me taking care of it. That included cleaning up after her when she was gone.
Pushing on, I walked through the room and to the bathroom. Peering inside, I could see that it, at least, was clean and livable. The shower had a curtain, and there was a myriad of soaps and shampoos on the ledge of the tub. It had clearly been used often and cleaned too. I reached up and touched the light.
“I’m turning the light off for now,” I said to the room in general. “I mean no disrespect. Just… have to pay electricity bills.”
After shutting off the light, the room was bathed in the warm sunlight from outside, streaming through the windows in the bathroom and bedroom alike. Outside, I could see Jason leaning against the truck. He was looking around at the land curiously, and I wondered how I got so lucky as to have such a sweet-hearted man be the one I broke down next to.
As I made it back into the living room, I noticed a sound that I hadn’t noticed before. It was a loud whirring sound, and it was coming from the window in the back. A large window unit air conditioner was stuffed into it, and it was running. At least that meant I wouldn’t die of heat exposure. Little miracles, I guessed. Climbing over the fallen boxes, I made my way back onto the trail and out of the living room to the door.
I hadn’t really noticed how stuffy it was inside until I got the door open and walked out into the sun. The freshness of the mountain air was incredible, and I savored it for a moment, taking in a few deep breaths and decompressing the situation I had just left before heading back out to Jason.