About Tomorrow - Abbi Glines Page 0,18

from Gran. They were so completely opposite. I mentioned it once to Gran as I got older and she said that Oliver, my grandfather, had spoiled my mother. They had tried for years to get pregnant and Gran had miscarried so many times they had given up hope. Then she got pregnant with my mother and from the moment my grandfather held her in his arms, he spoiled her.

Gran had then frowned and said that Oliver treating her like a princess had ruined her. I had to agree with that because my mother did, in fact, think she was a princess. I had never met anyone as self-centered as my mother. If I hadn’t demanded she come up here for Gran’s funeral and threaten never to speak to her again if she didn’t then Mom wouldn’t have returned from Paris in time.

I didn’t want to think about my mother right now. I had other emotions to get control over. Walking through the house, I looked in each room and inhaled the scent of home. How had I thought I could live anywhere else? It felt right here as if being in this house fixed any problems in the world. I would finally get to have Christmas in this house. As a child, I had yearned to spend Christmas here with Gran…and with the Sullivans.

Stopping at the kitchen window I could see the neighbor’s house. In the summer, it had been harder to see the Sullivan house from Gran’s because of all the green leaves and plants. However, most of now colorful leaves had fallen and there was a clear view to the Georgian style house that had been built in 1778. It was still a pale yellow. The new owners hadn’t changed the color. Except for the lack of a basketball goal outside it looked the same. Eventually I would go introduce myself, but I wasn’t ready to see someone else in the Sullivans’ home. The memories there were many.

While the Sullivans’ Georgian style home was three stories and impressive in size, my Gran’s house was smaller. My new home was a simple two-story colonial blue Greek Revival built in 1856. Downstairs was the kitchen, living room, dining room, and a laundry room with a toilet in it. Upstairs was two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The master bedroom had an en-suite; the second bedroom that had been my mother’s then mine was larger but the bathroom was in the hallway at the top of the stairs. There was a small attic at the very top, but it was small. The house had a front-gable roof so that left only a small triangle of space up there.

Heating was going to be interesting. There was a fireplace in the living room and master bedroom and a wood-burning stove in the kitchen. That was it. No more heat. No central heating and air. The summers here had never been unbearable without the air conditioning I was used to in Nashville. Gran had always left all the windows up and box fans going in the most used rooms of the house. I’d loved it. I wasn’t sure how I was going to love not having a furnace.

First thing I needed to do was find wood or I would freeze soon. Gran’s woodshed was only a third of the way full, and I knew that she had needed a full shed. In the back of the house, there was a rack that also held a cord of wood that stayed close to her back door. Every August before I left to go home, Gran had already had wood delivered and filled up all her storage for the winter. When I had asked her why, she told me the cold came quick here.

I wrapped my arms around my body and shivered as I walked upstairs. She was right. The cold was here. I had almost had the movers put my things in my old bedroom, but then I decided I would need the fireplace in Gran’s this winter. I headed to her bedroom at the end of the hallway and paused at the doorway to her room. The same blue and white quilt and white iron bed stood in the center of the room. The fireplace was in front of it, and there was wood already stacked to the side of it neatly in the holder.

Several pictures of me through the years sat on her mantel and one of my mother. The rocking chair where she