When my sweet Auntie Maud died peacefully while taking a nap, my grandmother, mother and I piled into the car to travel from Reading, MA to Glen Ridge, NJ for the funeral. My younger brother had been farmed out to friends.
The service and burial were private. My Uncle Archer was bereft. She had been his life-long companion. Never did she sit in a wooden chair that he had not dusted. The least breeze and he would bring her a sweater, needed or not.
After the burial we were all at my uncle's home, a three bed-room, bought and paid for decades before, wooden house with a postage stamp lawn, the neighbors could almost be touched from their mutual kitchen windows.
Despite his rising in the executive ranks of the telephone company he saw no reason to upgrade. They had the home they loved, everything they needed and more. True frugal New England Yankee thinking.
We sat in the comfortable living room. Joining my grandmother, who was also greatly saddened by the lost of her beloved sister-in-law, were Uncle Archer's son, daughter-in-law, and two grown granddaughters.
No one else was in the house.
Then the upstairs toilet flushed.
We looked at each other, counting the people sitting there. No one was missing except for Auntie Maud.
My cousin Joanie ran upstairs. A few minutes later she returned. "No one was there," she said.
The toilet had never self flushed before. To my knowledge, it never did again.
On the way back to Massachusetts, my mother and grandmother talked about the mysterious flush. Both had ordinary imaginations, but were never given to wild speculations.
"Could it have been Maudie, sending us a message?" my grandmother asked.
My mother and I had no answer.
My Thursday free write, designed to get the juices flowing for the rest of the day's writing. The story is a memory. The only change is catching typos and I hope I got them all.
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