It was a couple of weeks after Christmas, and I was standing by my mailbox in
vestibule of apartment building where I lived in Lexington, Kentucky, holding a letter I had just received. The handwriting was not familiar and neither was return address, although it was postmarked Seattle, Washington, same place where Hannah Paulson used to live.Many years ago when I was a little girl growing up on our dairy farm in west central Wisconsin, Paulsons had lived next door to us. The two farms were only residences located on our mile-long stretch of isolated country road, and during summer, I journeyed down hill a couple of times a week to visit Hannah. With her hair arranged in waves swept back from her forehead and kindly blue eyes twinkling from behind wire-rimmed spectacles, she wore cotton shirtwaist dresses in summer and a blue-and-white or pink-and-white checkered apron.
Going to see Hannah was highlight of my summer vacations. There was just something about Mrs. Paulson that drew me to her like bees that were drawn to wild roses growing around her big, old-fashioned farmhouse. I never considered that it might be rather unusual for me to enjoy visiting our elderly neighbor, even though there were no other neighbors with children for me to play with, and no other children in my family (my brother is twenty-one years older than me and my sister is nineteen years older).
During summer, Hannah and I would cut and arrange flowers because Mrs. Paulson loved to have flowers in her house. At other times I would find her working on a project, like cleaning out old chicken coop, or painting barn, or weeding her garden. No matter what Hannah was doing, she always let me “help.”
On days when it was too hot to be outside, we sat in Mrs. Paulson's kitchen and ate homemade oatmeal cookies. Hannah would ask me about books I was reading (I loved to read), and she would tell me about books she had liked to read when she was a little girl.
Hannah and her husband, Bill, had lived in Seattle before they bought farm next to ours. The farm had belonged to a relative of theirs, and they had wanted to live in country again. At one time, they had owned a farm in South Dakota. Hannah had been a kindergarten teacher when they lived in Washington, although she was retired by time they were our neighbors. As Paulsons grew older and farm became too much for them to take care of, they decided to move back to west coast and settled in Oregon. And yet, as I contemplated letter I had just received at my apartment in Lexington, I still couldn’t figure out who would be writing to me from Seattle. Especially since I knew it wasn’t Hannah.
