Thank you all so much for the kind comments! I wrote this really quickly – intending to set it aside and come back to it later, but then I kept having ideas for it. But when I write things quickly, I then agonize over whether they are any good or not more than when I've spent a long time thinking about them in the writing. So, it's very reassuring to read your comments.
And I'm sorry – I should have warned you all that it was going to be sad.
Blogger and Elisabeth – I think it is unfair to assume that Jessi and Kyle would be great writers just as their parents are, but I don't think it's unusual. I know that the rare times my younger brother had teachers I had had, they all expressed surprise at the differences in our strengths and he occasionally had teachers make snide comments to him about his “deficiencies” (I was a bit of a geek and my brother was not someone who really liked being a student.)
Beth – I know, right after I posted this I remembered telling you how much I hated writing about death and how I had trouble killing off a character in another story, so found away not to do it. I'm not sure why it wasn't that difficult this time. I think it was as in my head, this was a story about the farm, not Martha and Jonathan. Their death was a plot device. I know, the distinction is stupid, but I can't explain any better than that.
Elisabeth- I am really sorry to hear about your loss. I lost both my grandmothers two years ago and while I know it's nothing like losing a parent, I was incredibly close to one of them (much more than I am to either of my parents). I drew on my feelings from that a lot in the writing of this story.
It seems odd that they would both allow two years to go by without packing things up. In two years time, a lot of dust would settle. Food would go bad and drugs, herbs and toiletries would expire.
I wasn't thinking food so much as clothes and other things that wouldn't need to be dealt with immediately. My paternal grandmother waited five years to pack up my grandfather's stuff and my maternal grandmother just never packed up her husband's things (and he passed away 10 years before her).
The scents in the closet would probably not last that long either.
I wonder if it matters what the weather is like or something? My maternal grandmother went to live with my parents right after my grandfather died. She visited her house only occasionally (maybe once a year she'd make sure everything was in order), and so it was mostly closed up. Then about five years later, I ended up living there for a few months while waiting for an apartment to be ready to move into. The master bath still had the scent of the powder she used after she showered and the closet still had the faint smell of her hand lotion.
James and I made the decision this year that we wouldn't get stuck. It was a hard thing to decide, but it had to be done.
Congratulations on having the strength to make that decision. It can't have been any easy thing to decide or to carry through on. And I'm glad to hear that things are getting easier now.
