When Dad and I finished putting in the new heating and cooling system, it felt as though the old farmhouse had drawn its first deep breath in years. Warm air now flowed through its bones in winter and cool air in summer, like the steady heartbeat of a living thing. The upstairs rooms—our master bedroom, the bath, and my own room—had been walled in clean white drywall, bright and smooth as snow waiting for footprints.
Before that, the house had been stripped down to its frame—nothing but ribs of timber and echoing emptiness, like an old log cabin lost in the woods. Every nail we drove felt like giving it life again. Dad and I worked side by side, measuring, sawing, arguing a little now and then about where I should place my hand before he fired the nail gun. More than once a nail shot clean through the board where he’d wanted my hand to be, and we’d both laugh in that half-nervous way that fathers and sons do when something could have gone wrong but didn’t.
At last, enough of the house was finished that we could move in. The fifth-wheel had been good to us, but it never felt like home. The night before we carried our beds upstairs, I could hardly sleep. The next morning, sunlight poured through the windows, and dust motes drifted in the air like tiny stars. We brought in the refrigerator and stood my television in the living room corner. Dad said it was only temporary until we redid the floors, but it was good enough for now.
Even though two-thirds of the house still stood unfinished, it didn’t feel that way. Moving in felt like moving into a new apartment—clean, fresh, and full of possibility. We still used the fifth-wheel for cooking and storing clothes, but I had a bed of my own again—a real bed—and that meant more than I can say. Lying under a roof that had sheltered generations before me, I felt something stir deep inside, something both familiar and new. I was home.
The House and Its Ghosts
Our new beginning had been born out of an ending. The farm had come to us through Aunt Mary’s passing, and in the busyness of wiring, painting, and sanding, the grief of her loss had settled into the background. I told myself the sting had dulled because time had passed, but I think it was because work had filled our hands before sorrow could fill our hearts.
Outside, walking among the barns and the wash house, it sometimes felt like she was was just out of sight—a flicker at the edge of vision—standing there, waiting to feed her ducks and geese. The air seemed to carry her presence in quiet ways, in the flutter of wings near the duck house, or the rustle of straw in the Hilton, as we called it. When I fed the animals, I felt a connection to her, as if I were babysitting for her, keeping her routines alive while she was simply away. Maybe that was why the place never felt entirely lonely. In the rhythm of chores and hammering and feeding, there was still a sense of companionship—like she was near, keeping watch.
Aunt Jean
Across the hill lived Aunt Jean and Uncle Danny. When I had spare time I would visit and hang out with them in their front porch. I’d sit there with Aunt Jean, talking about the news or about faith, and sometimes about nothing at all. She was quick-witted and plain-spoken, with a spark that made conversation lively but never uncivil. Uncle Danny didn’t say much unless he had something worth saying, but when he did, it carried weight—like a hammer strike on an anvil. He was a no nonsense man who worked decades in the coal mines. He was tough but kind.
That summer, Aunt Jean began to cough. It was a small thing at first, just a tickle in her throat. She’d waved it off as a lingering cold. But the cough stayed. After a month, I told her she ought to see a doctor. So did others. She brushed it off until finally, worn down by concern, she went. The news came back like a thunderclap: stage four cancer.
We were all in disbelief. I had thought she’d be fine—that she just needed rest. Instead, two weeks later, she was gone.
Her final days were quiet ones, spent at home surrounded by Uncle Danny and her children. We didn’t go into the house until those last few days. Before that, most of our visits had been at the hospital. Dad took her loss hard. She was his mother’s sister, and I learned then that she had helped raise him when he was a boy. Our family never spoke much about such things. What I’ve learned about my kin has mostly come from old letters and scraps of history dug up from ancestry records, not from the mouths of those who lived it. There are uncles whose graves I’ve stood over and yet could not tell you a single story about their lives.
After Aunt Jean’s passing, I still visited Uncle Danny. The porch felt hollow without her laughter echoing through it. Sometimes Cousin Mike would stroll over from the barber shop, his siblings Matt and Tina would drop by. The porch became a kind of gathering place for quiet grief. We didn’t name it that, but that’s what it was. We were all trying to understand how someone so alive could disappear so quickly.
Sammy
October came on steady and cold. The warm days of summer had slipped away, replaced by afternoons bright with low sunlight and winds that carried the scent of rain and wood smoke. The leaves fell thick and fast, swirling across the yard like tiny flames before they settled brown and quiet.
One weekend, Mom drove down to South Carolina to visit her parents, leaving Dad and me alone on the farm. It rained for two straight days, tapping steady on the roof like a clock marking time. Late one night, near eleven, I heard a sharp sound outside—a high-pitched wheezing that didn’t belong to the wind.
I looked out my window but saw nothing. So I pulled on my boots and stepped out onto the porch. The night was black except for the pale beam of the porch light, and in that light I saw him—Sammy, our dog—lying beside his doghouse, blood pooling beneath him.
You could smell the deer even before you saw the damage. It was rutting season, and the air carried that strong, musky scent of urine that clung to the woods like damp smoke. Male deer get aggressive this time of year—territorial, unpredictable. Usually, they keep their distance from humans and dogs if not provoked. This one hadn’t. The buck had come out of the dark and gored Sammy before he could escape the run line.
I called for Dad. When he saw, his jaw tightened. Sammy was in bad shape, gasping in short, wet breaths. He was suffering.
Dad told me to go back inside. I knew why. The rifle cracked once, echoing through the hills, and then there was silence.
When he came back in, we stood there in the kitchen, soaked in rain and sorrow. Then Dad pulled me close, and we both cried. After a while, we went out again and dug a place near the tree line. The soil was soft from the rain. Dad wrapped Sammy in an old blanket, and together we laid him in the earth. We didn’t speak a word.
Lessons in Loss
Back inside, we washed our hands and readied for bed. Just as I stepped through my doorway, Dad called softly behind me.
“I love you, son.”
“I love you too, Dad,” I said.
That night, I lay awake thinking of a poem I had learned long ago—John Donne’s Death Be Not Proud. I’d first read it in high school, and it had stayed with me through the years. The point of the poem was that even though we dread death it really has no power. Death is not the end but merely a transition to eternal life. As Christian’s we have victory over death. This lessened the sting enough that I was able to fall asleep.
The next morning made the night before feel like a bad dream, until I looked out the window. Sammy’s doghouse sat empty, his leash hanging slack. That sight brought the ache back, deep and dull, sitting heavy in my chest. Work on the house resumed that day. Dad and I didn’t talk much. We didn’t tell Mom what had happened until she got back from South Carolina.
Lying in bed again that night, I thought of Aunt Mary, Aunt Jean, and now Sammy—all gone from this world but not, I prayed, from life itself. Death may walk our hills and shadow our days, but it cannot linger forever. Morning always comes, and with it, the soft light that reminds us there is more to the story than sorrow.
Looking back now, I can see how those earlier losses were teaching me what the heart could bear. Aunt Jean’s sudden passing showed me that death could come swiftly; Sammy’s, that it could come without reason. Each sorrow asked me to look again at what I believed. John Donne’s words—“Death be not proud”—lingered in my mind like a quiet promise, whispering that the story of love does not end in the grave. I did not yet know how deeply those lines would one day steady me, or how their truth would rise again when the world seemed to fall apart.