The autumn morning arrived with that peculiar Illinois chill that settles into your bones, the kind that makes you grateful for thick sweaters, hot coffee, and the hum of the old furnace kicking on beneath the floorboards. Outside my farmhouse, the fields around Milbrook were already turning the muted gold of late October. A thin fog clung to the ground, softening the edges of the barns and the line of maple trees along Old Mill Road.
I stood in my kitchen—the same kitchen where I’d raised three children, buried one husband, and lived through more winters than I cared to count—watching the old pipes beneath the sink drip their steady rhythm into the bucket I’d placed there two days earlier.
At sixty-seven years old, I’d learned that some problems announce themselves quietly before they demand attention. This was one of them.
I’d lived in this farmhouse for forty-three years, ever since Thomas brought me here as a young bride in the late seventies, when gas was cheap, country music still sounded like country music, and you could drive twenty minutes in any direction without hitting a strip mall. Back then, Milbrook was a dot on the Illinois map, surrounded by cornfields and two-lane highways, the town square dominated by a white-steepled church and a courthouse built in 1910.
“The house has good bones,” Thomas used to say, running his carpenter’s hands along the doorframes like a doctor examining a patient.
He’d reinforced those bones himself—replacing joists, shoring up beams, patching cracks in the foundation. Good bones, but aging joints, just like us. The leak had started small, almost apologetic in its persistence, a single drip from the kitchen sink that grew into a slow, steady trickle.
By Tuesday morning, I knew I couldn’t ignore it any longer.
The dampness had begun creeping up the basement walls, leaving dark streaks on the old concrete, and I could smell that distinct mineral scent of water where it shouldn’t be. My son Scott had been too busy to come by—always too busy these days, ever since he’d married Vanessa and moved into one of those modern subdivisions on the edge of town where all the houses looked like they’d been stamped out of the same mold.
My daughter Clare lived three states away in Michigan, with her own family and problems to tend. So I did what any sensible woman in downstate Illinois would do.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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