The House In The Woods

The House in the Woods

According to my maternal aunt Sally, my parents had to get married. My mother was just seventeen, and my father was almost twenty-one when she discovered she was pregnant with me. That meant my mother was a minor, and my grandfather was going to file criminal charges if my father didn’t marry his daughter.

He complied, and the whole deal was swept under the carpet or hidden in the closet as they tried to live a normal life. Actually, that wasn’t too difficult because my father had taken a job with an oil company when he graduated from college, and he was gone for long periods, either overseas or offshore.

This was the pattern as I grew up, only as the years passed he was home less and less. By the time I left for college, he always managed to go directly from one project to another. This seemed to work well for my mother, and she used the time to pursue online college classes. She always said the only thing she regretted about getting pregnant was not going to college.

Then my senior in college, my father filed for divorce. Nobody was surprised, and I think my mother was relieved and happy. What surprised everyone was how pissy he was. Over the years, he had accumulated a fair amount of money in an offshore account, and the divorce was written up to protect that account.

“What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is yours” was his attitude, and he was really smug and vindictive about it. He wound up being very sorry about it.

I had just started my first year in grad school when an aunt of my mother’ s died and left my mother and her sister a sizable inheritance.

I was home for the holidays, and the family was all celebrating. During a lull in the general chatter, which was mostly my uncles giving me grief about getting a Masters degree in Anthropology, my aunt Sally turned to my mother and said, “Julie, you’re still a young woman, Tommy’s on his own in Grad school, you’re still smokin’ hot, and you ARE rich. Girl, you are at the top of your game, and you can do whatever the fuck you want. What do you want to do?”

My mother didn’t hesitate, “I want to go to college. I want to enroll somewhere, go to classes, and graduate with a degree. I don’t care what it is; I just want a degree.”

That was the first time I think I really saw she was, as Sally said, Smokin’ Hot.

Over the next few months, she found a small university in northern California that would accept her online credits, sold her house and had a moving company relocate what she wanted to take with her to a house she had rented.

I wound up my last class mid-May, and because my aunt insisted I that help my mother drive, we set out together in her new compact 4X4 SUV. She had wiped the slate clean, and this was pretty much a total do-over.

Because there was no hard time-table and because this was her new beginning we made a good many side trips, particularly when we got to northern California. We meandered around on little forest service roads mostly because she liked the idea she had a 4 wheel drive vehicle.

That’s also how we managed to get lost. There is that moment that kind of grinds your stomach when you come to that realization. There was no cell coverage because of the mountains, and the maps stored in the tablet were very out of date when it came to forest service roads. The sun was starting to set, so we decided to drive until dark and then pull over and sleep in the car. In the back of the SUV were water and protein bars. We had plenty of gas, so once the sun came up, we could try and find road signs to find our way back to the main road.

About ten minutes after we came up with the plan, we rounded a sharp corner, and to our surprise, there was a house. Just coming across a house would have been surprising, but this house was quaint, very bright, with a garden, and just cheerful looking.