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                                                The House at the End of the Road

At the end of a long, winding road – covered with potholes, steep climbs, sharp turns, and quick descents- you come to a drive where trees shade your passage.  Set back in a large property is an old manor house.  Its wallpaper is fading; should you move a painting, its impression is clearly marked on the wall; the floors, in certain spots, buckle and bend, from too many seasons and a multitude of footsteps.  The living room’s atmosphere is one of genteel grace . . . comfortable velvet chairs, a card table set in one corner, a puzzle table in another, the draperies a rich burgundy silk cascading in layers to the floor, its design as unique as the home itself.  In the dining room an extra long cherry table graces the room, a crystal chandelier twinkling above it.  The bedrooms are largely filled by an assortment of elderly people who have come to need a home, not a nurse.  Over everything is a faint air of musty, vaguely pungent, old body sweat, even while the ceiling fan sluggishly churns the air around.

Outside, a deep porch sweeps the length of the house, filled with comfortable chairs.  In the summer the guests like to sit out on the porch and help shell peas and snip beans for supper as well as to be frozen for the winter ahead.  Beside an extended green yard is a river, its waters slipping silently past, chairs set along the bank so guests might sit and while away their time, watching the river flow by.  On the bank, even birds’ songs seem dampened...

The home is operated by a family with several children who have grown up mopping floors, emptying commodes, and helping guests dress while they dream of the day they will escape to a better life – that being virtually any life but there.  Their resentment at times bleeds through into their actions, although always at each other and their mother, never at the guests; they are well aware of where their bread and butter comes from, their mother reminds them all the time.  Their father has little effect in their lives – a quiet man, he hides in the family quarters, drinking his regrets away.  His life a shadow of what it should have been, what he knows he could have been, what his wife reminds him he should be.  They live in quarters upstairs from most of the guests, although there are a few who live in bedrooms close by.  The children tip toe through their rooms, their mother always admonishing them to be silent.  As a result, hostilities and frustrations are never addressed – everything is on slow simmer.  At night the older ones slip out through the back door and escape into town for relief at their mother’s ignorance.  It is the only fresh air they breathe.

Each guest is unique, a gem, the stamp of their personality imbedded into the fabric of their being.  They had a story of their lives within the home, how their presence added to the mix of human stew.  Some came for just a short stay as with the man with hardening of the arteries in his brain, a violent man who, though bed bound would hit whoever came to help him.  Others were longer, the whole duration of the house’s time as a residential home for the elderly.

When Cassie came to the home, she was a crotchety, aggravating person who seemed to relish making life difficult for whoever was trying to help her.  A tiny woman with her hair always pulled neatly back in a barrette, she had been one of the first two women to graduate from Harvard.  A teacher, she had worked with every grade from preschool to graduate school.   Before she came to the home, she ate only hard-boiled eggs and grape jelly.  She would throw food at anyone who would come to her place to check on her.  It was only when she collapsed from malnutrition that she found her way to the home.  For months she ate in the kitchen because she threw food she didn’t like and generally made a