Little Brown House with Yellow Shutters

For fifteen years, it was just Jason and me in the little brown house with yellow shutters.  When Jason was five, I bought the home on Old Mill Court to be closer to his babysitter, who lived three doors away.    Soon after we moved to the court, she quit, saying, "I can't do this anymore! It's waaay too hard!" Or something like that.

Raising Jason was hard.  I never intended to do it alone.  When I married his father, my plan was to have six kids, raise them all on the farm, and grow old surrounded by my large, loving family.  At thirty-five, I pictured myself at sixty with gray hair tied in a bun, wearing a loose-fitting Calico Prairie dress over my round, plump body, standing in our farmhouse kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies while three or four of my many grandbabies tugged at my dress.  "Nana, pick me up!"  "No, Nana, pick me up!" "I love you the most, Nana." "No, Nana.  I love you the most." Or something like that.

My plans fell apart the day the bank called, and what they had to say changed J.J.  Being a mother changed me.  We were different somehow, and not in a good way.  Farming was all J.J. knew, so when that was gone, he set about making a new path in a world not to his liking.  I was too preoccupied with the new love, love, love of my life to notice that our paths were separating and going in two different directions.  Then one day we looked at each other--two strangers--and said, "Where have you been?  I've just now noticed that you've been gone for a very long time."  Or something like that.

BACK TO THE LITTLE BROWN HOUSE WITH YELLOW SHUTTERS

It wasn't a 160-acre farm with chickens, goats, sheep, horses, cows, hogs, and a dog named Laddie, but it was a home full of love and critters:  birds, fish, tarantulas, dogs, and cats.  Jason never got to grow up on the farm with five younger siblings, all fighting over who got to clean the hog pens, shovel horse poop, kill a chicken for Sunday dinner, milk the goats or spend sixteen hours a day working in the fields.  Instead he lived alone with a tiny old lady who lived in a little brown house with yellow shutters.  She colored over her gray hair, refused to wear frumpy prairie dresses, and shuttered at the thought of some rug rat calling her "Nana." Yep! Exactly like that.