Read Online From Here to There by Rain Trueax - Free Book Online Page A

Helene looked at the dusted, vacuumed and sparkling living room and felt a sense of real satisfaction. She had spent almost all of the two weeks since she'd been at the Rocking H cleaning house, cooking and canning. The first frost had come like a thief in the night to blacken the tops of the garden vegetables. She'd worked hard, gathering in the salvageable produce, canning and preserving jars of tomatoes, drying herbs and storing mature squash, pumpkins, potatoes, and carrots in the unheated pantry at the back of the kitchen.
    When her hair had gotten in the way, she had chopped it off herself which she frankly had felt seemed symbolic and satisfying whether it looked good or not. She hadn't done this much work in the years since she had quit coming west, after Aunt Rochelle had died. She knew it was good for her. She needed the feeling of accomplishment as she considered her life, her mistakes and what she wanted to do next. She thought of Phillip often but hadn't begun annulment proceedings. She couldn't bring herself to talk to her uncle's lawyer but soon she'd have no choice but to drive up the freeway to Bozeman. It wasn't fair to Phillip to dawdle on cutting the connection between them. If nothing else, she should give him his freedom.
    When she went to put her cleaning supplies away, she was surprised to find a small leather bound book pushed back in the corner. Opening it, she saw the handwriting was her aunt’s, a personal journal. She hadn’t realized she kept one and quickly put it back. It wasn’t hers to read.
     "Hey, anybody home." She heard her uncle's voice from the kitchen porch as he banged his boots on the outside step.
     She walked into the kitchen she had always loved. Two woodstoves stood at opposite ends of the long room. The first, Aunt Rochelle's cook stove, was as yet unused by Helene, although she remembered wonderful meals prepared on it by her aunt and before that by Great-Aunt Tessie, Amos's mother. The other, a cast iron woodstove, took the chill off the kitchen on nippy mornings and was capable--when the electricity went out--of heating the entire downstairs. Along two walls were tall cupboards and long counters to prepare any kind of feast a woman was inclined to make.
     In modernizing the kitchen, a dishwasher had been added just before Aunt Rochelle had died; and with the modern range and refrigerator, Helene had found cooking these last weeks a pleasure, especially when she could look out the window and see the Absarokas rising high above her or go out the backdoor and stand on the long porch to gaze across a mountain meadow, that seemed to stretch forever and sometimes had a small herd of elk grazing at one end of it. She would draw into her lungs clean mountain air filled with the scent of pine and sage and wonder why she'd ever left this place.
     A vegetable and beef stew simmered on the back of the electric range, the smell of freshly baked bread was strong in the air. She smiled as her uncle and his large German shepherd, Hobo, came through the outside door, answering grins on both their faces. "Smells pretty good in here," Amos decreed as he headed for the simmering stew and Hobo plopped himself down behind the heavy cast iron woodstove, out of way of errant feet.
     "It's not done," she warned as Amos lifted the lid on the cast iron pot.
     "Just the smell's good enough for me." He took a cup of coffee from her. "You know this place hasn't smelled or looked so good in the two years since Chelle died."
     Helene washed her hands, dried them on her jeans, poured herself a cup of coffee, and sat with him at the long, rough-hewn oak table, the centerpiece for the large kitchen.
    “I uh found her journal, I think.”
    Her uncle looked at her. “I didn’t know she kept one.”
    “I didn’t either. Should we burn it? I didn’t read it.”
    He considered that a moment. “You know, Chelle knew she was dying. The cancer had come back and it was no surprise that she was at the