AN EXCERPT: How is it that some places still seem innocent? With only a few minor changes, we could have been attending the fair held by our neighbor’s parents and grandparents. Of course, no place is fully innocent. It’s true, this area is incredibly unique in its number of small farmers and ranchers—rural people who can still tell you who owned which bank in the 1930s, and who was stingy with loans during the Dust Bowl. It’s true that an older gentleman seated next to Jim at a barbeque recently could describe for us his fear, as a child, watching blankets of dust enveloping his parents’ ranch. And it’s true, of course, that everyone in town knows more about our house than we do. One night, a grizzled man stopped us in the local pizza joint to ask what we thought of the wood stain he’d put on our floors. The kindhearted local judge stopped by one afternoon to say hi and mentioned that, forty years earlier, he had worked on our roof. And, most interestingly, our neighbor’s grandchildren wanted to know if we’d encountered “the Grey Lady,” a ghost who walks through our attic at night—or so their parents had told them.
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