Sometimes Grandma would drive us out in the country. Her light blue Cadillac was a late 1950s model with the gas fill pipe hidden under a taillight and enough room in the back seat for five grandchildren to romp without serious injury. We'd drive and drive and end up at the one-room schoolhouse where my mother went before high school. When we visited it was fairly trashed by use as a cabin by itinerant sheep men, but the chalkboard was still up and a few old-fashioned school desks were still in place. I can still remember the cloak room and the wood stove and the schoolbooks strewn about even after twenty years of abandonment. My cousin and I would play school because we hadn't started real school yet and didn't know any better, and our respective oldest siblings would take turns as teacher and scold us.
Maine Prairie was a town in the 1860s that died a slow death after the transcontinental railroad passed it by and I believe the school was its last surviving building. It was moved a few miles closer to Dixon before my mother went there. I found an interesting article on the place, which my mother enjoyed reading as she recognized a few names, names she heard bandied about the dinner table when she was a small child -- about the same time she learned to amuse her parents by screeching "Rudy!" whenever they played Valentino on the radio.
I'm a sucker for local history and can easily imagine going to where Google Maps places Maine Prairie and poking around in the dirt for clues. However I've a feeling, and I'm not sure why, that there are no ghosts there. Certainly there are none at the schoolhouse location. I drove by a few years ago, and it was pure farmland. Nothing but rows of alfalfa.
6 comments:
Sic transit gloria mundi!
No ghosts. If there are ghosts, they are not natural things, and rows of crops don't give them anything to hang on to.
Bwahahaha. No ghosts. Nothing for miles around. Perfect setting for a Stephen King novel...
. . . except for the small boy who died during a hide-and-seek game while crouching in an alfalfa row who returns each day at dusk to tell the other children he's back, he was only joking, he was hiding in the alfalfa behind the school and didn't mean to scare them as they called and called and searched for him. He's back, but he can't find the school anymore, or the other children, who are in fact either old men and women in nursing homes now, or dead and gone, and you can hear the rustling of the alfalfa on windless, moonlit nights.
And then the guy and his pregnant wife make an offer on the house. Lookit all this land, wow, you don't see that anymore! A lot of work to fix up the place, but we have the inheritance now, can hire people. Their doggie doesn't want to get out of the car. Oh, come on! Silly doggie. What's the matter? Whine, whine. Real estate agent grins. Well, you know animals, ha ha, they sometimes act funny until they get used to a place.
OMG, pregnant wife! Don't go down to that cellar alone, after nightfall, knowing the light bulb is burned out and hearing very strange noises you wish to investigate by your pregnant lonesome self as your husband is away in town getting drunk and that barmaid is making eyes at him! DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR!
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