It was always Grandpa’s house to me. The farmhouse, built by my great-grandfather in the 1880s, is filled with childhood memories. My great-grandfather, John Erickson, died forty years before I was born, and his daughter Lydia, my grandmother, died in her early fifties in 1928. I knew them only from stories told about them; but I loved my grandfather, Olof Olson, and greatly grieved his death when I was eleven.
My mother, her two sisters, and their brother grew up in the house, which they always thought of as home. Years after their deaths, they all live vividly in my memories.
In September 2026, my husband Kent and I stayed in the house for the second time in four years following a long absence since my childhood. My cousin and her husband have invested much love and money into restoring and updating the house, although they do not live there.
We again slept in the west bedroom upstairs, the biggest in the house. Its double windows look out over the apple orchard. This is the room where great-aunt Gerda died in the 1950s after several years of dementia and confinement, a memory that still haunts me. I never saw her in her final years, but before she disappeared into that locked room forever, she paced in the hall, twisting her handkerchief in her hands. No longer able to speak, she made grunts and groans that I continued to hear behind the locked door.
Kent and I, exhausted after three days of driving, slept soundly in the big bed, illuminated by nightlights that were almost too bright.
Before dawn, I was startled awake by rapid flashes of strobe-like lights. Was an alarm going off on my phone? No.
I shook Kent awake, “Is your phone flashing?” It was not.
I felt my way to the bathroom, flipped the light switch, and nothing happened. Then I realized the nightlights had gone out, and the only illumination was those bright lights flashing outside the house. Was there a police car in the driveway? Looking out the south window, I saw light pulsing behind clouds, unlike any lightning I’d ever seen. Could bombs be exploding? I heard no sounds, but I didn’t have my hearing aids on.
I went back to the bedroom and found Kent pulling on his clothes to go outside. “Do you hear any noises like bombs?”
“No. I’m going to see what’s happening.” He thought the roof might be on fire.
“Don’t! There’s nothing you can do! It’s lightning. Come and see!” We both peered through the south window where the frequency of the flashes was already slowing.
We went back to bed. But I couldn’t go back to sleep. My phone indicated there might be a power outage in Menominee County, but the map showed no location.
My head was filled with thoughts of the old days when there was no electricity, no night lights and no phones. Electricity had come to the house just a few years before I was born. I remembered my shock when reading in Aunt Viola’s diary, “They hooked up the electricity today.” It was the late 1930s, and I realized that in my reading of the diaries up to then, I hadn’t pictured them living without electricity.
Memories overwhelmed me. Were my ancestors trying to send me messages? Had Aunt Gerda come back to haunt me? There had been so much life in that house, including mine as a young child. I was the first grandchild in the family, born when my grandfather was seventy-five years old. I remembered the voices, the laughter, the cries of those long-ago days. I remembered Aunt Viola (I called her Ola), scrambling eggs for my breakfast every morning in a pie tin on the wood stove. I recalled my childhood fears when lightning flashed, thunder cracked, and I ran to wherever Ola was sleeping and crawled into bed with her in search of safety.
I lay awake, reliving the past until, without warning, the nightlights came back on. For reassurance I looked out and saw a light on a pole in the yard across the road. I breathed more easily and fell asleep, plunging into an intense dream that had nothing to do with anything. Or did it?
I am at a conference in Venice, Italy, and I leave my backpack containing my money, phone, and identification unattended in a plaza when a woman I barely know insists I go on a walk with her. We walk together until she mysteriously disappears. I can’t find her anywhere.
I ask myself, how could I be so careless and so stupid as to leave my pack and follow her? Am I losing my mind? I climb a hill and ask a policeman for help. He looks at me like I’m crazy. Nothing makes sense! Wait a minute! There aren’t any hills in Venice. I must be dreaming!
With that realization, I wake up. Light is creeping into the sky. The nightlights are still lit. The dream and the ghosts are gone.
I write this while lying on a couch that sits in the exact spot in the living room where my beloved grandpa died (although on an older couch) in September 1955. The memories keep coming. There are enough stories in this house to fill a book, and now I’ve added one more.
