My Grandma Davis died last month. We're back in Indiana, staying with Aunt Nora while the family works on settling her estate.
My brother and I are going through a box of her husband's old stuff. We never knew my Grandpa Davis, so it's sort of interesting: clothes, photos, a plaque from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, his high school yearbook. And, wrapped in a linen cloth, an oval stone about the size of a baseball.
It doesn't look special. It's like any stone you would pick up on the side of the road. Why did he keep it? Why did he wrap it so well?
"Oh, I remember this!" Aunt Nora exclaims. "Mom used to bring it out and show it to us every time she told the story of the Witch of the Lake of the Woods. Do you want to hear it?"
Ken and I glance at each other. Grandma never told stories about ghosts or witches. She lived in a regular house on a regular street, with a color tv and a picture window. She drove into town to have lunch with her friends. Everything about her was fresh and new and modern
Why this one story, buried in the depths of her past?
