So, I am writing this on a challenge from some co-bloggers – a Hallmark/Lifetime Movie holiday romance novel, which is turning out to be rather fun, and which I may finish by Christmas, which will be very suitable

Chapter 3 – Autumn in Alder Grove

As I drove west the next morning, I tried to remember the last time I had been in Alder Grove for anything longer than a flying visit to check on Granny May’s house. I came up dry. She died about the time that I started my senior year in high school, before Sheridan retired, so it must have been that Christmas before. Sheridan and Mom and I had driven from Houston and stayed a week. And after that, Sheridan and Mom moved back to Georgia, where Sheridan had been from originally. Maybe I knew then that it would be the last time in Granny May’s little white cottage with the wide front porch, the padded swing hanging from the porch ceiling. I loved sitting in that swing, rocking gently, and pretending that I was in a boat on the waves … Look, I should explain about all of that, and Alder Grove, and why I so loved Granny May’s house so deeply that I have regularly visited in dreams.

Granny May was my paternal grandmother. We – that is, Mom, my father and I lived then in San Marcos, the college town midway between Austin and San Antonio. Well, when I was three years old, Mom and Daddy were coming home very early one dark Sunday morning from honky-toking with friends on Austin’s Pecan Street, and their car was smashed into by an 18-wheeler on the highway. (The 18-wheeler’s brakes failed, or so investigators deduced afterwards.) Daddy was killed immediately, and Mom was in the hospital for months – years, even. She spent so much time being operated on to repair the damage done to her in the accident and then in physical therapy between operations that the only men she had a chance to meet were doctors. That’s how Mom met Sheridan, originally – he was one of her consulting surgeons. All during this time while Mom was in and out of hospitals, I lived full-time with Granny May until I was seven years old. Her dear little house was my home, the one that I recalled all these years later.

Granny May left it to me in her will, along with all the furniture in it – all of that and her personal stuff had been stored for years in the next-door neighbor’s shed. The little house had been out to rent to one local family or another. Mom and Sheridan had seen that it was handled by an agency in San Marcos, I supposed. In the years since Granny May passed, I had driven through Alder Grove a couple of times, making certain in passing that the house hadn’t burned down, or been struck by a tornado. To be strictly honest, I hadn’t wanted to stop and knock on the door of her house – which was so vivid in my dreams as it used to be when she was alive – since I would then see it all changed and being lived in by someone else.

Well, now I was coming back to Alder Grove. And it was in my mind that I might stay for a while.

It was a three-day drive in Blue Thing, across Virginia, down through Tennessee. I crossed the Mississippi at Memphis, and reaching the West, and began to feel that I was almost home. Still, it took another day to get across Arkansas, and dropping south to Dallas-Fort Worth. Nothing to do but drive, hopscotching across America, with no other purpose to my day than moving on. I spent the last night in a little hotel outside Waco and headed out early the following morning. South on 130, passed by Lockhart, with the domed county courthouse looming above the trees, and on through the rolling landscape, dotted with stands of oak. I wanted to bypass Austin, where the traffic is notoriously choked to a standstill in any direction. Now and again, passing an old farmhouse like Granny Mays’, or more often a gaggle of single and double wide trailers with sagging roofs, attended by a ring of junky cars and old farm equipment. It was autumn now – still to hot in the afternoon to endure a road trip with the windows down – but when I started out that morning it was cool enough, so I did roll the windows down.

I slowed Blue Thing down to a sedate crawl of thirty miles an hour, upon reaching the turnoff towards San Marcos. Almost home – or really, the closest to the home of my heart. Alder Grove is a small place – a hamlet, really, where half a dozen narrow country roads meet in a scattering of huge old oak trees. Granny May told me once that there were really no alder trees there – but the first family to take up a homestead in the area were named Alder, and it should really have been called Alder’s Grove. At any rate, Alder Grove boasts a post office and tiny general store at the main crossroads, a Sons of Herman lodge, two churches serving the religious needs of the community (Methodist and Lutheran), an auto body shop, a little café, and about forty houses scattered along the main two roads, most of them at the ends of unpaved dirt driveways. There was also an old Humble Oil gas station across from the post-office and general store. The square little brick building with a peaked roof and an overhang where the pumps used to be still stood there when I was a child, but the big glass front windows were boarded up, the gas pumps long gone. I used to ride my tricycle to it, the quarter mile from Granny May’s house, pretend to buy gas, stop in at the post office-general store to buy some penny candy and a postcard to send to Mom in the hospital, and ride back again. The post office and general store was owned by a family named Gamble. It was practically a historic monument, that little general store. Granny May had been school friends with the Gamble daughters, and it was their last remaining family member who owned the house next door, and who had stored all of her household things against the day when one of us Robertsons returned.

I slowed down even more when I came to the first house at the edge of town, right where the signpost for Alder Grove advised slowing to 25 mph. There were no sidewalks – it wasn’t that developed a town. Past another house and a side road with a set of mailboxes mounted on a length of pipe. The intersection with the general store stood – a stack of sacks of garden compost sat outside, and two bright flowerpots planted with yellow chrysanthemums.  There was a woman about my age watering them with a garden hose in her hand. I waved as I went past – it’s what one does, in Alder Grove. In the review mirror, I saw that she was looking curiously after the car. I still had DC license plates on it.

I was cheered to note that. I was also cheered – as well as intrigued to see that someone was making use of the old Humble station, across the road. Wow – the windows were no longer boarded up and the glass underneath polished clean. It looked as if some kind of workshop or office had been set up inside. There were some curious welded metal abstract sculptures standing where the gas pumps would have been, while underneath the awning, a muscular guy in a welder’s safety helmet and heavy gloves on his hands was doing something to some more metal – something that involved a lot of electric blue sparks and a faint hissing sound. Six, seven, eight driveways – and there was Granny May’s house. I felt tears starting to my eyes. Her house looked … empty and depressed. The grass was burnt around the edges, and the white paint looked faded, chipped and sad. No curtains in the windows, no plants on the porch, as Granny May always had. I parked Blue Thing around to the side, where the old garage stood. The garage was as old as the house , barely large enough for a single small car the size of a Ford Model A and sagged slightly to one side like a large van going around a tight corner.

I was home, in Alder Grove.