![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouAnd a true one -- yet another fond memory of the years owning a bookstore. Since it's halloween, I figured no time like now for amusing folks with this recollection.
A and my business partner were evening-shift cooks in the two most popular restaurants in town, and she started coming by the shop to visit before work. She was a few years younger than me, and living in the house her great-grandfather built; her grandfather and her mother had been born in the house. When A was in her early teens or thereabouts, her mother died, and A's family moved out of state. An aunt was ostensibly the house's caretaker but for all practical purposes the house was abandoned, empty.
When A turned 18, she elected to come back. The house had been badly vandalized, and A and her aunt spent hours cleaning up and painting over graffiti, replacing busted-out window panes, getting working light fixtures.
It's a simple house, but a sturdy one. By my estimates, built maybe around 1910 or so, in a compact rural one-and-a-half bungalow style. The downstairs had two front rooms bisecting the house's width; the front door opened into the living room, with the dining room directly beyond that. At the very far back, the kitchen was maybe half the depth of the previous four-square rooms, sharing space with the back porch.
Through the dining room and to the right, you would find the back hall that linked the back door, the kitchen, the front study, and held the staircase, a rickety and narrow passage that curved up and around to the top floor.
Upstairs, a nursery-sized room sat over the kitchen/porch area, with a medium-sized bedroom over the dining room and a rather large master bedroom over the two front rooms. A bathroom was tucked under the eaves, sharing the footprint of the downstairs hallway, an awkward space but overall very efficient.
The house was heated by an old woodstove in the dining room, and the windows were single-paned, rattling and creaking with the slightest wind. The front door scraped on the floor and the backdoor let in a draft, but for the most part it was a sturdy house given its age -- but it was also constantly breaking in little ways that A just couldn't keep up with.
She was maybe 20 and working full time and trying to have a decent life at the same time and her younger sister had just moved in with her, as well. Their mother's social security check (due to orphans until age 18) helped some, but A was doing the work of three people to make ends meet. Just keeping things together was the best she could do. There wasn't ever enough left to do more, and they'd repaired or covered over the worst of it, but the rest would just have to be.
Except for one room, that is. She'd returned to find everything in the house wrecked or stolen, with the sole exception of the downstairs study. It had a two broken windowpanes but was otherwise pretty much intact and unmolested: and that's where this ghost story begins.
One day she came by the shop, complaining that she couldn't keep a roommate. If she could, the rent could help offset some of the costs of keeping up the house -- and as I recall, most of the post-vandalism repairs had been paid for by, and maxed out to some extent, her aunt. A lived there with a minimal rent, but heating your house with a woodstove and paying for the electricity for window units isn't cheap, either. The problem was that she couldn't keep a roommate longer than a week, at most.
When you walked in the front door, there was a doorway to the right, which was a medium-sized (maybe 14x14) room that had once been her grandfather's study. It was perfect for a housemate, but time and again housemates would complain (completely ignorant of the previous housemates' complaints) of waking to lights flashing in the room, to a sensation of a heavy weight resting on the bed on top of them, and that the room was freezing bitterly cold even on a hot Virigina night.
I think she'd just lost her eighth housemate when she mentioned it to me, and given that she'd never really felt the least bit uncomfortable in the house -- she pretty much grew up there -- she was baffled as to what was going on. I think her grandfather was a rather strict man, but one who loved his family, and A never mentioned anything that might give the impression that her grandfather would be malicious... and she sure didn't think her mother was, either, so if it was a ghost, it couldn't be either of them -- even if both of them did die in the house.
She was pretty much at her wit's end, and said to me, "all I want is someone to tell me what the ghost -- or whatever it is -- wants, because I could really use that extra rent money!"
I thought about it afterwards, and a day or two later two women came through who were ceremonial magicians. We had all sorts coming through the shop, from the textbook wiccans to the enochians to a few druids to a bunch of country witches, along with plenty of Episcopalians, Methodists, and the ubiquitous Unitarian Universalists. (Religiously diverse and generally all very friendly.)
S and N were both very well-grounded level-headed people, that it seemed to me that even if they couldn't help A figure out what was up with her house, they were at least perceptive enough to help her come up with a plan. I called A, and she was off work and home, so I sent S and N over.
A few days later, A showed up to give me the report in person.
S and N had introduced themselves, refreshments had been offered, and then S brought out her tibetan singing bowl... which wouldn't sing. She kept trying, while A showed them around the house, chatting with S and N... they'd made their way back to the dining room, and A was apparently about to give up. The singing bowl still sounded like dull pottery, S was looking puzzled-annoyed, and finally N just sighed and said, "look, don't take this the wrong way, but I think it's a lot simpler than you realize." She was trying to come up with the diplomatic version...
Which was when S blurted out, "basically, Mom says CLEAN YOUR ROOM."
Right then the singing bowl zings into a clear bell-tone like it's supposed to, while A stood there blinking. (She said later to me, "I almost said, that's it? that's the mystery of the ages?" or something like that, because... seriously, how mundane!)
According to S and N, the family's spirits were tired of the house looking like a pigsty, and that in turn had A just beside herself -- because, as she pointed out, she really only got like a half-day off a week, and only one night free each week, and she was way too tired to clean and sure as hell couldn't clean all day to really get the place sparkling. She was kinda amused by it, as was I.
But I'd also been to her house several times by that point, and yes, I can state here for the record that even in August, if you stepped across the threshold from the living room to the old study, the temperature really did drop fast enough and far enough to bring out goosebumps. It was like sticking your head into the freezer. Far as I was concerned, if cleaning was what it would take to make the house -- or its spirits -- a bit more hospitable, then cleaning was what was gonna happen.
It wasn't even really that organized; the shop hosted a weekly get-together for the pagan community, on Wednesdays. That was also A's night off, and sometimes she had the energy to come by, though usually she didn't. That night, as people wandered in, I announced we were all getting back in our cars and caravaning over to A's, where we were going to CLEAN. THAT. HOUSE.
Okay, at first, people were like: do what? Then I explained, and like wildfire next thing I know everyone is totally into it, getting some of the cleaning stuff from the shop and calling up friends and telling them how to get to A's, and a few people volunteering to go by the grocery store on the way and pick up sodas and chips and some munchies...
We had the pagan lesbian high school teacher, the two marines (and the wife of one of the marines), two country witches, two college students who were also ceremonials, three of the 'dabbling in wicca' kids who were also high school & glbt, and a few other folks -- all told, I believe I led the parade of something like sixteen people tromping up to A's front door to bang for her to let us in.
A did, and started to say hello then looked past me to see everyone else and said, "who are all these people!?" I said -- traipsing past her with a bag of chips and a bucket with cleaning products -- oh, this week, we're having the get-together here, instead!
And in came the next person, then the next, then the next, while A stood there with her jaw around her knees. Most of the folks didn't even know her, but they cheerfully told her they'd heard her mother's ghost was not happy with the house's condition.
Hi, we're from your local alternative bookstore, and we're here to help.
First thing that we did -- at the push from the HS teacher, if I recall correctly, was to stand in the old study. We held hands in a circle, and the self-annoited ringleader (not me! one of the shop's denizens) announced to the house, "we don't know you, and we've only just met A, but we're friends of the hidden fox and we're here to clean, so..." She sort of trailed off, until someone said, "so we're gonna start cleaning now!" And off we went.
We had four folks on their knees in the dining room, going at the old glue that had held down cheap vinyl over the original wood floors -- and that stuff did come up, once we figured out the product that would do it. Two more folks actually got all the spilled paint off the floor in the study; I was busy scrubbing down the kitchen, before joining in on paint-drip removal in the study.
One of the Marines scared the bejabbers out of several folks by going outside and cleaning the windows from the outside -- look, there, a face, in the window! Screams and then we ended up laughing... right as a thunderstorm started rolling in.
So now we have a houseful of people industriously scrubbing at everything, while A helped here and there and answered questions about where to put stuff, or took stuff to put it away in her room or her sister's room, and we mopped and swept and dusted and wiped and scrubbed and rinsed. By about nine o'clock, we'd been at it for maybe three hours and were making magnificent progress, and the thunderstorm was in full bore around us -- windows rattling, door creaking, the shuddering sensation of thunder cracking directly overhead, and we just merrily went along, even when rain began sheeting down outside.
At the same time, I think it was I and one of the HS students in the study cleaning old paint off the floor -- spilled from when A and her aunt painted, since that study was (to no surprise by this point, eh) the one room untouched by vandals. It wasn't really strenous work so much as just careful, getting the edge of the thick paint spills and peeling it off the floor to make sure we didn't hurt the original wood floor and I realized: I didn't have goosebumps anymore. The room was warmer.
Eh, maybe that was just me... so the next time A came around, we called her to come into the study and waited for her to say something, because we felt warmer but maybe... A stepped through the doorway and got this peculiar look on her face, then stepped out again, then back in again, and said, half-frowning, half-confused, "that's strange, it feels almost... warm in here." (And a cheer went up from the paint-scraping crew.)
By about ten o'clock, the whirlwind tour was winding down, and out came the munchies and drinks as groups finished up their task -- including the scrubbing of the painted brick behind the woodstove -- and everyone congregated in the living room. A was still pretty much in shock, and couldn't stop going on about how awesome and sparkly everything looked. Sure, it was still old and some of it broken and some of it creaky but it was a clean old and creaky and half-broken, damn it.
The thunder was long past, the rain subsiding into a steady shower, and the ringleader looked around as we all made room on the sofa and the floor around the coffee table laden with snacks and drinks. There had been folks upstairs cleaning the bathroom, but they were alerted we were wrapping up, and the back-hall group joined us along with the bathroom group and all the rest.
The ringleader, preparing to suggest a toast for the work well done, looked around and said, "that's everyone? we haven't forgotten anyone, right?"
No sooner were the words out of her mouth, than every light in the house went off.
A long pause as we sat there in the dark -- I know I, for one, was too busy thinking, wait, I didn't hear thunder, what happened to the lights?
Then A spoke up and said, "it's okay, Mom, we know you're there--"
And the lights came right back on again.
Yes, there was another long pause, before we decided this had to be a good sign, and then there was much laughter and munching and boasting to each other of what we'd cleaned, while A pitched in to express her shock and amazement and gratitude, and we were all acting like it was totally just a day's work to be guerilla house cleaners on unsuspecting members of the community. It was very much of the awesome.
This didn't get rid of the ghosts, of course; that hadn't been the intention. The study remained a rather foreboding room, but it wasn't as totally chilly after that (just slightly so) and only one person after that ever complained about strange lights. Things generally settled down, and A did her best to maintain the clean we'd started.
It was maybe two or three months after this, though, that she swung by, rather depressed since she'd been seeing a guy and now he wasn't even talking to her. It was their second or third time hanging out, and the first time he'd come to her house. They were watching a movie on tv, in the living room, when he asked where the bathroom was.
Ten minutes later, she said, he came flying down the stairs, ran out the back door, and left the driveway so fast he ground the gears and almost burned rubber. Left his coat, his shoes, and his wallet in his coat, too. The next day, the guy's friend called saying he'd come get the stuff from A's work but he wouldn't go to the house, and the guy himself wouldn't go near A, and sure as hell wasn't going anywhere near that house ever again.
It took A meeting the friend in person to pry out of him what had happened, since the guy wouldn't have anything to do with her. Turns out the guy had been leaving the bathroom when he'd looked down the hallway towards A's bedroom at the front of the house. A woman was coming down the hallway towards him... and there wasn't anything of her from the waist down. He didn't stick around to see what else there wasn't of her, but just bolted, fear of god in him and everything, and wasn't willing to risk ever coming back.
A, understandably, was more than a bit miffed. (She did confess to fussing outloud at her mother's ghost, the evening after learning of this, saying, "he was cool! and he has a job! and he's good-looking! don't go ruining my relationships, Mom!")
She and I commiserated over it, shaking our heads over Moms and their intractable ways. But there wasn't much to be done since the guy was more than willing to keep a county between himself and A from then on, and neither of us could see a single reason her Mom would've been so threatening.
A month later she walked into the shop and said, in a flat shocked voice, "you remember that guy I was dating, the one my Mom scared so bad?"
"What about him," I said.
"He's been arrested for rape."
Multiple date-rapes, at that. Some from before he'd been dating A, one afterwards. She probably would've been one more victim, that night, if he'd not left. Neither of us were in doubt about that one. We were quiet awhile until she slapped her hands on her knees, stood up with a cook's long-suffering groan and said, "well, guess I gotta get home and apologize to Mom."
Because mothers do know best... even the disincarnate ones.
A and my business partner were evening-shift cooks in the two most popular restaurants in town, and she started coming by the shop to visit before work. She was a few years younger than me, and living in the house her great-grandfather built; her grandfather and her mother had been born in the house. When A was in her early teens or thereabouts, her mother died, and A's family moved out of state. An aunt was ostensibly the house's caretaker but for all practical purposes the house was abandoned, empty.
When A turned 18, she elected to come back. The house had been badly vandalized, and A and her aunt spent hours cleaning up and painting over graffiti, replacing busted-out window panes, getting working light fixtures.
It's a simple house, but a sturdy one. By my estimates, built maybe around 1910 or so, in a compact rural one-and-a-half bungalow style. The downstairs had two front rooms bisecting the house's width; the front door opened into the living room, with the dining room directly beyond that. At the very far back, the kitchen was maybe half the depth of the previous four-square rooms, sharing space with the back porch.
Through the dining room and to the right, you would find the back hall that linked the back door, the kitchen, the front study, and held the staircase, a rickety and narrow passage that curved up and around to the top floor.
Upstairs, a nursery-sized room sat over the kitchen/porch area, with a medium-sized bedroom over the dining room and a rather large master bedroom over the two front rooms. A bathroom was tucked under the eaves, sharing the footprint of the downstairs hallway, an awkward space but overall very efficient.
The house was heated by an old woodstove in the dining room, and the windows were single-paned, rattling and creaking with the slightest wind. The front door scraped on the floor and the backdoor let in a draft, but for the most part it was a sturdy house given its age -- but it was also constantly breaking in little ways that A just couldn't keep up with.
She was maybe 20 and working full time and trying to have a decent life at the same time and her younger sister had just moved in with her, as well. Their mother's social security check (due to orphans until age 18) helped some, but A was doing the work of three people to make ends meet. Just keeping things together was the best she could do. There wasn't ever enough left to do more, and they'd repaired or covered over the worst of it, but the rest would just have to be.
Except for one room, that is. She'd returned to find everything in the house wrecked or stolen, with the sole exception of the downstairs study. It had a two broken windowpanes but was otherwise pretty much intact and unmolested: and that's where this ghost story begins.
One day she came by the shop, complaining that she couldn't keep a roommate. If she could, the rent could help offset some of the costs of keeping up the house -- and as I recall, most of the post-vandalism repairs had been paid for by, and maxed out to some extent, her aunt. A lived there with a minimal rent, but heating your house with a woodstove and paying for the electricity for window units isn't cheap, either. The problem was that she couldn't keep a roommate longer than a week, at most.
When you walked in the front door, there was a doorway to the right, which was a medium-sized (maybe 14x14) room that had once been her grandfather's study. It was perfect for a housemate, but time and again housemates would complain (completely ignorant of the previous housemates' complaints) of waking to lights flashing in the room, to a sensation of a heavy weight resting on the bed on top of them, and that the room was freezing bitterly cold even on a hot Virigina night.
I think she'd just lost her eighth housemate when she mentioned it to me, and given that she'd never really felt the least bit uncomfortable in the house -- she pretty much grew up there -- she was baffled as to what was going on. I think her grandfather was a rather strict man, but one who loved his family, and A never mentioned anything that might give the impression that her grandfather would be malicious... and she sure didn't think her mother was, either, so if it was a ghost, it couldn't be either of them -- even if both of them did die in the house.
She was pretty much at her wit's end, and said to me, "all I want is someone to tell me what the ghost -- or whatever it is -- wants, because I could really use that extra rent money!"
I thought about it afterwards, and a day or two later two women came through who were ceremonial magicians. We had all sorts coming through the shop, from the textbook wiccans to the enochians to a few druids to a bunch of country witches, along with plenty of Episcopalians, Methodists, and the ubiquitous Unitarian Universalists. (Religiously diverse and generally all very friendly.)
S and N were both very well-grounded level-headed people, that it seemed to me that even if they couldn't help A figure out what was up with her house, they were at least perceptive enough to help her come up with a plan. I called A, and she was off work and home, so I sent S and N over.
A few days later, A showed up to give me the report in person.
S and N had introduced themselves, refreshments had been offered, and then S brought out her tibetan singing bowl... which wouldn't sing. She kept trying, while A showed them around the house, chatting with S and N... they'd made their way back to the dining room, and A was apparently about to give up. The singing bowl still sounded like dull pottery, S was looking puzzled-annoyed, and finally N just sighed and said, "look, don't take this the wrong way, but I think it's a lot simpler than you realize." She was trying to come up with the diplomatic version...
Which was when S blurted out, "basically, Mom says CLEAN YOUR ROOM."
Right then the singing bowl zings into a clear bell-tone like it's supposed to, while A stood there blinking. (She said later to me, "I almost said, that's it? that's the mystery of the ages?" or something like that, because... seriously, how mundane!)
According to S and N, the family's spirits were tired of the house looking like a pigsty, and that in turn had A just beside herself -- because, as she pointed out, she really only got like a half-day off a week, and only one night free each week, and she was way too tired to clean and sure as hell couldn't clean all day to really get the place sparkling. She was kinda amused by it, as was I.
But I'd also been to her house several times by that point, and yes, I can state here for the record that even in August, if you stepped across the threshold from the living room to the old study, the temperature really did drop fast enough and far enough to bring out goosebumps. It was like sticking your head into the freezer. Far as I was concerned, if cleaning was what it would take to make the house -- or its spirits -- a bit more hospitable, then cleaning was what was gonna happen.
It wasn't even really that organized; the shop hosted a weekly get-together for the pagan community, on Wednesdays. That was also A's night off, and sometimes she had the energy to come by, though usually she didn't. That night, as people wandered in, I announced we were all getting back in our cars and caravaning over to A's, where we were going to CLEAN. THAT. HOUSE.
Okay, at first, people were like: do what? Then I explained, and like wildfire next thing I know everyone is totally into it, getting some of the cleaning stuff from the shop and calling up friends and telling them how to get to A's, and a few people volunteering to go by the grocery store on the way and pick up sodas and chips and some munchies...
We had the pagan lesbian high school teacher, the two marines (and the wife of one of the marines), two country witches, two college students who were also ceremonials, three of the 'dabbling in wicca' kids who were also high school & glbt, and a few other folks -- all told, I believe I led the parade of something like sixteen people tromping up to A's front door to bang for her to let us in.
A did, and started to say hello then looked past me to see everyone else and said, "who are all these people!?" I said -- traipsing past her with a bag of chips and a bucket with cleaning products -- oh, this week, we're having the get-together here, instead!
And in came the next person, then the next, then the next, while A stood there with her jaw around her knees. Most of the folks didn't even know her, but they cheerfully told her they'd heard her mother's ghost was not happy with the house's condition.
Hi, we're from your local alternative bookstore, and we're here to help.
First thing that we did -- at the push from the HS teacher, if I recall correctly, was to stand in the old study. We held hands in a circle, and the self-annoited ringleader (not me! one of the shop's denizens) announced to the house, "we don't know you, and we've only just met A, but we're friends of the hidden fox and we're here to clean, so..." She sort of trailed off, until someone said, "so we're gonna start cleaning now!" And off we went.
We had four folks on their knees in the dining room, going at the old glue that had held down cheap vinyl over the original wood floors -- and that stuff did come up, once we figured out the product that would do it. Two more folks actually got all the spilled paint off the floor in the study; I was busy scrubbing down the kitchen, before joining in on paint-drip removal in the study.
One of the Marines scared the bejabbers out of several folks by going outside and cleaning the windows from the outside -- look, there, a face, in the window! Screams and then we ended up laughing... right as a thunderstorm started rolling in.
So now we have a houseful of people industriously scrubbing at everything, while A helped here and there and answered questions about where to put stuff, or took stuff to put it away in her room or her sister's room, and we mopped and swept and dusted and wiped and scrubbed and rinsed. By about nine o'clock, we'd been at it for maybe three hours and were making magnificent progress, and the thunderstorm was in full bore around us -- windows rattling, door creaking, the shuddering sensation of thunder cracking directly overhead, and we just merrily went along, even when rain began sheeting down outside.
At the same time, I think it was I and one of the HS students in the study cleaning old paint off the floor -- spilled from when A and her aunt painted, since that study was (to no surprise by this point, eh) the one room untouched by vandals. It wasn't really strenous work so much as just careful, getting the edge of the thick paint spills and peeling it off the floor to make sure we didn't hurt the original wood floor and I realized: I didn't have goosebumps anymore. The room was warmer.
Eh, maybe that was just me... so the next time A came around, we called her to come into the study and waited for her to say something, because we felt warmer but maybe... A stepped through the doorway and got this peculiar look on her face, then stepped out again, then back in again, and said, half-frowning, half-confused, "that's strange, it feels almost... warm in here." (And a cheer went up from the paint-scraping crew.)
By about ten o'clock, the whirlwind tour was winding down, and out came the munchies and drinks as groups finished up their task -- including the scrubbing of the painted brick behind the woodstove -- and everyone congregated in the living room. A was still pretty much in shock, and couldn't stop going on about how awesome and sparkly everything looked. Sure, it was still old and some of it broken and some of it creaky but it was a clean old and creaky and half-broken, damn it.
The thunder was long past, the rain subsiding into a steady shower, and the ringleader looked around as we all made room on the sofa and the floor around the coffee table laden with snacks and drinks. There had been folks upstairs cleaning the bathroom, but they were alerted we were wrapping up, and the back-hall group joined us along with the bathroom group and all the rest.
The ringleader, preparing to suggest a toast for the work well done, looked around and said, "that's everyone? we haven't forgotten anyone, right?"
No sooner were the words out of her mouth, than every light in the house went off.
A long pause as we sat there in the dark -- I know I, for one, was too busy thinking, wait, I didn't hear thunder, what happened to the lights?
Then A spoke up and said, "it's okay, Mom, we know you're there--"
And the lights came right back on again.
Yes, there was another long pause, before we decided this had to be a good sign, and then there was much laughter and munching and boasting to each other of what we'd cleaned, while A pitched in to express her shock and amazement and gratitude, and we were all acting like it was totally just a day's work to be guerilla house cleaners on unsuspecting members of the community. It was very much of the awesome.
This didn't get rid of the ghosts, of course; that hadn't been the intention. The study remained a rather foreboding room, but it wasn't as totally chilly after that (just slightly so) and only one person after that ever complained about strange lights. Things generally settled down, and A did her best to maintain the clean we'd started.
It was maybe two or three months after this, though, that she swung by, rather depressed since she'd been seeing a guy and now he wasn't even talking to her. It was their second or third time hanging out, and the first time he'd come to her house. They were watching a movie on tv, in the living room, when he asked where the bathroom was.
Ten minutes later, she said, he came flying down the stairs, ran out the back door, and left the driveway so fast he ground the gears and almost burned rubber. Left his coat, his shoes, and his wallet in his coat, too. The next day, the guy's friend called saying he'd come get the stuff from A's work but he wouldn't go to the house, and the guy himself wouldn't go near A, and sure as hell wasn't going anywhere near that house ever again.
It took A meeting the friend in person to pry out of him what had happened, since the guy wouldn't have anything to do with her. Turns out the guy had been leaving the bathroom when he'd looked down the hallway towards A's bedroom at the front of the house. A woman was coming down the hallway towards him... and there wasn't anything of her from the waist down. He didn't stick around to see what else there wasn't of her, but just bolted, fear of god in him and everything, and wasn't willing to risk ever coming back.
A, understandably, was more than a bit miffed. (She did confess to fussing outloud at her mother's ghost, the evening after learning of this, saying, "he was cool! and he has a job! and he's good-looking! don't go ruining my relationships, Mom!")
She and I commiserated over it, shaking our heads over Moms and their intractable ways. But there wasn't much to be done since the guy was more than willing to keep a county between himself and A from then on, and neither of us could see a single reason her Mom would've been so threatening.
A month later she walked into the shop and said, in a flat shocked voice, "you remember that guy I was dating, the one my Mom scared so bad?"
"What about him," I said.
"He's been arrested for rape."
Multiple date-rapes, at that. Some from before he'd been dating A, one afterwards. She probably would've been one more victim, that night, if he'd not left. Neither of us were in doubt about that one. We were quiet awhile until she slapped her hands on her knees, stood up with a cook's long-suffering groan and said, "well, guess I gotta get home and apologize to Mom."
Because mothers do know best... even the disincarnate ones.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 04:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 04:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 09:04 am (UTC)Yay for you guys helping out though!
no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 10:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 01:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 10:01 pm (UTC)That's my jaw, hanging open.
WOW.
WOW.
no subject
Date: 1 Nov 2008 10:06 pm (UTC)I feel my dad around sometimes. I'm sure if I ever brought a guy like that home Dad and my older brother (died before I was born) would be right there, menacing as all get-out.
no subject
Date: 2 Nov 2008 05:32 am (UTC)What a wonderful story!
*sits down to read it again*
no subject
Date: 2 Nov 2008 06:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Nov 2008 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Nov 2008 01:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Nov 2008 01:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 4 Nov 2008 02:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 Sep 2011 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 11 Sep 2011 07:27 am (UTC)