Print a guarantee given the prognosis.  Quietly she went to each person in the family, to Alta and other guests to tell them what they meant to her.  She then swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills one night at bedtime.  In the morning, she had such a peaceful expression. 

 

There was this old letch named John who lived upstairs.  Unfortunately, this meant he was not as likely to be under the watchful eyes of the family who were usually downstairs working once upstairs chores were done.  He sat with a couple of other men and watched television all day – and flirted with any female flesh that passed by.  With whiskers sprouting from his nose and ears, his mustache permanently stained from too many years chewing tobacco, he was a stocky man with a pot belly and perpetually  swollen legs from gout and poor circulation.  When he first arrived, he would sit with his pants undone while in the living room until someone caught him.  It turned out he used to touch the littlest girl in the family inappropriately when he was away from the other men and the opportunity presented itself.  He would unzip his pants or take them off and place her upon his lap. He fondled this four-year-old in all manner of inappropriate ways but she was too little to stop him.  One afternoon, when the other men were napping, the little girl was making her way into the family quarters.  He called her over and began his lascivious touches.  The mother happened to pass by at the right minute.  John was gone from the home that very day. . . he had done his damage, and the scars would be felt by the girl throughout her life, but at least the abuse wouldn’t continue.

 

Then there was Florence . . . an old-fashioned, raw-boned country woman who had worked hard all her life and her body showed it.  She had all the soft folds of flesh found on many elderly bodies.  Powder would catch and clump in the creases, giving her an aroma that was uniquely hers.  Florence especially like to help out shelling peas or snipping beans or something else related to food preparation as it made her feel more at home.  She tried her hand at cross-stitching but her eyes were no longer as keen and forgiving as they had been when she was younger.  The family always thanked her for the cross-stitched items she presented them with and then quietly put them away.  Her decline via colon cancer was as hard to watch as it was hard to experience.

 

Gertrude, or Gert as she was affectionately known, came to the home after being in a nursing home for four years.  She went there because she had broken her hip but the nursing staff never put her through rehabilitation.  She spent those fours years trapped in a bed, her body covered with huge bed sores.  Her mind, perhaps never the strongest, deserted her from lack of use; it was a muscle requiring usage just as any other muscle in the body.  Her body had atrophied as well; she was overmedicated to ensure her compliance.  It took four months, one for each year of being bedridden, for her to relearn how to walk and gain any semblance of sanity.  When she went to visit her son, who lived close by, she would inevitably come home tipsy, a state she thoroughly enjoyed being in.  She was always a little loopy but that was part of her charm.  Her laughter would spill frequently out from the door of her room.  You needed to learn her ways to be able to understand her sometimes, but it was always worth the effort.

 

Ruth had owned a horse ranch in the valley, its palominos and Morgans highly sought after.  Tall, statuesque, but showing the stoop of the ages, she was a woman of exacting standards, which might explain why, in a time when divorce was virtually unheard of, she had been twice.  She had also been a widow two times, one husband dying of cancer, the other from being kicked in the head by a horse.  Her property abutted two Amish farms and she