“My parents are moving in with you. If you don’t like it, come back to the city.”
I didn’t say anything, but I left a surprise that would turn their lives upside down. Before we continue, please subscribe to the channel and write in the comments what time it is where you are now.
The keys felt heavier than they should have. I stood in Rebecca Marsh’s real estate office in Cody, Wyoming, holding them while she stapled a stack of papers I’d already forgotten. Outside the big plate-glass window, a March wind pushed tumbleweeds across the asphalt of the strip mall parking lot, past dusty pickup trucks with Wyoming plates and fading bumper stickers about elk season and high school football.
“Congratulations, Mr. Nelson.” Rebecca smiled like she’d just handed me the world. Maybe she had.
“You’re officially a property owner in Park County.”
The cashier’s check for $185,000 had left my account that morning. Forty years of overtime shifts, skipped vacations, packed lunches in brown paper bags. Four decades compressed into six figures, now converted into eight hundred square feet of timber and solitude, twelve miles from civilization.
“Thank you.” I pocketed the keys and shook her hand. My fingers were steadier than I expected. The drive from her office took me west on Highway 14, past gas stations with American flags snapping in the wind and motels advertising “Hunter’s Rates,” then north onto roads that grew narrower with each turn.
Pavement became gravel. Gravel became dirt. Cell service dropped from four bars to two, then one, then none at all.
I stopped at a little general store that looked like it had been there since the Eisenhower administration. I bought coffee, bread, eggs, butter. The clerk, a woman in a Cody Broncs sweatshirt, asked if I was visiting.
“Living,” I said. She nodded like I’d said something wise. The final two miles climbed through pine forest so thick the afternoon sun barely penetrated.
When the cabin appeared in its clearing, I pulled over and cut the engine. Elk—four of them—grazed fifty yards beyond the porch, their coats winter-thick and dark against the lingering patches of snow. They raised their heads, studied my truck, then resumed eating.
One flicked an ear at a fly. I sat there for five minutes watching them. No honking, no sirens, no voices bleeding through apartment walls like back in Denver.
The story doesn’t end here –
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