This is another Grandma story, one she wrote and typed up during a writing class some years ago. It's one of her longest stories. I really liked it, and re-typed it for electronic sharing with minimal changes.

It is fiction, but many of the incidents are based on real places or experiences.


In Search of the Isp

Sometime between her husband’s death and his funeral, Irving proposed. She had known him since he was a child, when he had come to the village with a gray streak of dirt around where he had washed only the front of his face. Now, as he stood before her, declaring his lifelong yen for her, one lens of his glasses was clean, but the one over his blind eye hadn’t been washed for months. Cassy stood shocked and speechless while he rattled on:

“I suppose my timing is wrong. My only excuse is that you’ll be snatched up quickly, and I wanted to get my bids in first.”

To herself she thought, ‘Not in a million years. Bids yet, like a good addition to his cattle herd.’

“Yes, the timing is wrong,” she muttered, with no attempt to conceal her annoyed embarrassment. She was relieved when her son entered with some frantic question about funeral arrangements.

She survived the wake and the church service in total numbness and didn’t remember any of it afterward. The cemetery service brought another problem. Her children had chosen a beautiful casket in a highly polished alder. She had agreed with such extravagance because they thought it necessary to honor a professional cabinet-maker, who had spent his retirement days salvaging beautiful old pieces of wood to make toys and art objects.

‘I bet he is now turning over in it,’ she thought as she watched the casket slowly lowered into the ground. ‘Any number of beautiful things could be made out of such a big piece of wood, if only Buddy were here to recycle it.’ She had a lifelong habit of not being able to control laughter at the most inappropriate times. ‘I can’t laugh here,’ she scolded to herself. ‘What will people think? Think about something else!’ She covered her face with her hands, and the tiny choke that came from her was mistaken for a sob. Her daughter put her arm around her.

Then it was all over – except for the gathering at her home afterward. At that time she was told that she was stoic and a good sport. She thought it was easy to be both when everyone was helping her. The first few times someone asked her what she was going to do, she didn’t understand. Another put it bluntly: “Are you going to live alone?” They seemed aghast that she would consider it. Cassy was dismayed that anyone would question it. She had already been alone through all of Buddy’s long hospital stays. She had adjusted to it. When the subject of what she planned to do came up again, she said, “I’m going to do O.K.”

The next day, the last nine relatives left for the airport. At the taxis in front of the house there were a lot of hugs and kisses, and a few tears, while a few interested neighbors stood around to enjoy the spectacle. Then her life settled down almost too much.

She frantically threw herself into the numerous little pieces of desk work necessary to settle his small but quite complicated estate. Last year, he had helped her prepare for this task, and they had written down the five most important things to be tended to immediately. She ended up with closer to twenty-five, and some she had to do twice because of mistakes by professionals in one office or another. She was further delayed by an insurance claim form demanding that she write down every hospital that he had been in over the last five years, and every doctor that he had seen in his entire life. ‘Wouldn’t you think a death certificate would be proof enough of the state of his health?’ she thought [in exasperation].

She had read somewhere that any person in her position should accept any social invitation that came her way, no matter how unattractive, or she would be sorry afterward. Her first two invitations were to attend two more funerals. She dutifully dropped her desk work and went, and surprised herself by getting through both of them without too much trauma and actually enjoying some of each outing.

Back at her desk and writing thank-you notes, she found she rarely had time to think of Buddy or herself. Other times, the fact that he was gone hit her like a Sherman tank. She cried a little, and banged her typewriter a lot, and got back to work. After one bad crying spell, she decided she needed to join a bereavement support group, but the mail disclosed that she needed to take the train into the city to see her attorney again. ‘When do others find time for bereavement support groups – or even bereavement? I’ll join one next year.’

One morning when she was in the middle of a long line of figures, the phone rang. After fifteen minutes of listening to meaningless chatter, she explained that she had to finish some totals before the mail came. Starting over, she had almost got to where she had left off the first time, when the phone rang again. The same chatty woman had forgotten to tell her something! She ended the call as quickly as possible. Then startled again when the phone seemed to shriek at her for the third time. This time she ignored it, told herself she had to get away from all these demented people, grabbed her purse, and left in the car. She was a mile down the road before she decided where she was going. She went for a walk around the local golf course – the area’s closest excuse for a woods. She soon was laughing at herself for trying to get away when she was the only “demented people” in the neighborhood – demented for answering the phone in the first place, and letting it bother her. When she got home, she easily added the figures in one-tenth the time she had spent struggling to get halfway through the problem, before. She felt so much better after her walk that she found herself wishing her grandmother’s old house at the lake hadn’t been rented so [quickly] successfully. She could go up there and walk in the woods every day, and the place didn’t have a phone.

There came a day that she got caught up[ with the last of the desk work on the estate], and had nothing more to do than wait for “them” to get back to her. She heaved a big sigh and plugged herself into a video of an old musical. She had spent twenty minutes in another world of light romance and beautiful music before she startled off that sofa and was back at her desk almost before she got vertical. She had forgotten to do her [own] income tax!

After the income tax and another dozen thank-you notes, things lightened up for real. Cassy took care of a number of things around the house and yard that had been neglected during her husband’s illness. Little by little, her days improved… until the day her zipper stuck. Both her [late] father and her [late] husband thought fixing a woman’s stuck zipper was one of life’s greatest pleasures. What does a woman alone do with a caught zipper running up her back? She fumbled with the unseen menace, getting more frustrated by the minute. She tried turning the dress around to where she could see what she was doing. It wouldn’t budge. In a temper, she grabbed the scissors, cut the whole dress off, and threw it in the wastebasket. Then she realized all she needed to have done was put on a coat and walk fifty feet to Lena’s front door [to ask for help] and ask her to help her.

Then came the episode with the roto-tiller. Cassy longed to plant a garden. Even half of the former garden would be better than none. She had never tried to run the tiller because Buddy enjoyed it so, and he thought the [little] light-weight machine was too heavy and dangerous for a woman. She didn’t even know if she could get it started, and decided she never would know until she tried it. She went out to the shop and read the manual to make sure she knew how to stop it, and all the other safety precautions. She had no trouble starting the tiller.

‘Now, if I can lift it enough to turn it…’ She turned it. ‘This is no heavier than lifting my children when they were four years old. Whatever made Buddy think this was too hard for me? This is so much fun maybe he wanted to keep it all to himself.’

Her heard sang as she sailed down the fence line, turning the dirt. A couple of men were talking to Lena’s husband on the other side of the fence. They stopped talking long enough to gawk at her. The combination of glee and smug [expressions] on their faces told her they were just waiting for her to have an accident.

She came to a little knoll that Buddy had never tilled. It had always been an irritation to her that he had never cleared the weeds out of there, but he never said why he wouldn’t. She turned up one row around the outer edge of the knoll, turned around it, and came back one row closer to the middle.

‘I’ll clear up that eyesore in a few minutes and do the garden spot tomorrow,’ she thought. On the third row in, the tiller blade caught something metallic under the soil. Before she could get it stopped, weeds, dirt clods, and rusty pieces of fencing flew in all directions. The former owner, who had built the fence years earlier, had [left] buried the surplus wire [to bury itself in the ground instead of] without ever cutting it off the last post. That post came down, with several more feet of fence.

She had the dirt wiped off her face and could see again before the men stopped laughing. Then Cassy who had never sworn in her life, called them every bad name she could think of, including a few she didn’t know that she knew. The most polite was “Oink oink.”

She left the tiller in its entanglement, went straight to her car, and drove away. Twenty minutes later she parked in an empty field and was thoroughly ashamed of herself.

‘Why can’t I just cry as other women do, instead of making such a fool of myself? That nice husband of the domineering Lena probably thought I already knew about the wire. I’ll have to apologize right away, or I’ll never be able to face him or Lena again.’

She was gone less than two hours. When she came back, her neglected front lawn had been mowed, trimmed, and weeded. Her entire garden plot was tilled, the post was back up, and the fence mended. Her untangled tiller was resting, unharmed, next to the locked shop door. More work had been done than three men could possibly do in two hours. Her friends and neighbors must have had a surprise work party organized before she ever had her tantrum. They had come in with at least four pieces of equipment, worked miracles, and left. Nobody ever told her who did it.


Cassy got back to indulging in hobbies that she had been neglecting for years. She began to enjoy life again – life that she had once thought was gone forever. Although everything was going smoothly, she was aware that something was still terribly wrong, something that she could neither define for herself nor describe to another. It was with her night and day, gnawing at the depths of her being. It disturbed her inner peace and interrupted her concentration. It was something like hunger, but not the same. This was a thing she had never before experienced. She told herself that whatever it was, it would go away if she ignored it. It wouldn’t be ignored, and it didn’t go away.

‘Could it be I’m undernourished?’ she asked herself. She couldn’t remember what she’d eaten for breakfast that morning. Yesterday, she’d dumped some leftovers into a bowl, told herself it was a balanced diet, and swallowed it quickly before her stomach woke up to protest. At noon she had been late to the grocery store, so she bought and ate a banana and a candy bar while shopping. With all those carbohydrates, it’s no wonder she forgot to eat a proper lunch. For dinner, she had a plate full of cold, four-day-old, French fries. ‘Wow! You really know you’re a widow when you’re eating cold fries for dinner.’ One meal last week, she had sat in front of the TV with a big mixing bowl of popcorn and a glass of cold beer, and called it dinner. ‘So this is what’s been niggling me. How stupid of me not to figure it out sooner.’

But she had guessed wrong. After instant reform of her cooking and eating habits, her illusive problem was still there, worse than ever. It played havoc with her innermost psyche and interrupted her deepest sleep. She remembered that the old people in her family used to believe that anyone who lived alone went mad eventually. Maybe they were right.

“Get that notion out of your head right now!” she said aloud. “Maybe it’s a physical problem; I better see a medical doctor. Talking to myself, yet!” Her little dog wagged his happy little tail because he thought she was talking to him. With that decision, she knew she had to give “The Thing” a name, to describe it in some way.

But no name seemed to fit. She tried several “I” words: illusive, indescribable, indefinable, insipid… Then came “S” words: secret, subtle, sensitive, something. Then some “P” words: place (inside), pest, part (of me), psyche, probing, problem. All came close, but none could describe it in detail. It was a wispy, intangible thing, like trying to catch the smoke that is choking you. She finally settled for I.S.P., and called it The Isp.

She pictured herself in the doctor’s office, trying to describe The Isp. He’d ask her what was the problem. She’d say she didn’t know, but whatever it was it was driving her crazy.

“Are you sick? Do you hurt somewhere?”
“No pain, just a sort of an ispy ache that doesn’t ache.” Then he would write doctor-code for “whatever” on her chart, and send her home with no invitation to come back. Her imaginings changed her mind about seeing her doctor. She’d have to play sleuth herself.

In the next few days, she thought of a lot of possible explanations for her subtle problem, and rejected them one by one. Loneliness? She’d been lonely before, and there was nothing mysterious about it. Sexual longing? Shed felt that, too, in the past, and there was nothing subtle about that.

Was there something troubling her soul? Did she need to talk to her pastor? There had been times during her husband’s slow death when she felt totally unplugged from things spiritual. Other times, she had felt closer to her own brand of angels than she had ever been. Some days she became “Good and Mad” at God and asked, “Why me?” over and over. Somehow she knew that the forgiving God, who she had learned to trust in her youth, understood. Nowadays she talked to Him more than ever. No, she didn’t need advice from her church’s young pastor.

She spent more time than ever before thinking about her grandmother’s house – actually her house now. Grandmother had been gone a long time. If she could only go up there for a week or two, she thought. She’d get plenty of fresh air, undisturbed rest, and lots of outdoor exercise. She would walk around the small lake, and play with her dog. If that wouldn’t cure her of The Isp, nothing would.

There came an evening when she suddenly noticed her Isp was gone, and had been for quite a while. She rejoiced and relaxed, and felt she was free of it forever. Maybe she would never figure it out, and it didn’t matter. The next morning, she woke up with The Isp gnawing at her more exasperatingly than ever.

‘How can something so elusive make me feel like I’ve been run over by a truck?’

That day, the mail contained a notice that would properly have been considered bad news. Her tenants at the lake, [one of her major sources of income,] had found the house of their dreams and would be moving out at the end of the month. By the date on the letter, that meant they were out already.

It took her less than an hour to throw into her car all the necessities for camping in an empty house. She called a neighbor about the lawn and the paper, and was on her way, complete with her delighted little dog Bappy.


By the time they were within ten miles of the lake, Cassy had thought of a few cooking and cleaning things that she had forgotten to pack. She stopped in the last small town. Leaving a squirming Bappy leashed to the front bumper, she quickly made her purchases. They were soon on their way again, both relieved.

She arrived at the house feeling refreshed and competent. Bappy was ecstatic, so she turned him loose. She had unpacked and made a small meal before he returned. They both ate, and Bappy took off again to nose contentedly through the fragrant undergrowth. She bundled herself up against the night air and sat on the porch railing.
The stars looked close; the air was fresh and crisp. The lake seemed deserted, except for one cheery light in the old Cameron place. It didn’t disturb the solitude she was seeking. The only sound was the slapping of the water against the pillars of the empty dance hall: kathuk-kathuk, pause and repeat.

Her mind drifted back to the happier times, and she was a child again, running through the woods with the Cameron girls. Every summer, on the day she arrived, she would visit all the old landmarks. There would be a familiar rock, a woodpecker tree, and a pile of lumber that had been their camp a year before. Best of all, there were three shady springs in her grandparents’ own woods. The springs fed lush bands of greenery, and trickled down to Short Creek below. During the driest of years, the highest spring would dry up before the summer was over. During the wettest of years, the creek would rise and widen enough to swallow up the lowest spring. But the middle spring was always there. The other springs went unnamed, but the one in the middle the girls called “Loyal.”

Good old faithful Loyal! In the morning she would take a walk to that spring. Returning to the present, she discovered she was cold clear through and almost asleep. It had been a long day. She whistled for Bappy. Although it was still relatively early, they were both glad to go indoors.


Bappy got restless at five A.M. She let him out, and felt no more need for sleep. At seven A.M., with Bappy bouncing at her boot heels, she was walking a well-worm deer trail towards the middle spring. The walk took longer than she thought it would. She wasn’t as sure of the spring’s location as she had been when she started. Twenty years is a long time, and terrain changes. She wasn’t lost; she could still see part of the house, and hear the sloshing of the lake. Puzzled, she turned to the left. After a few steps, she saw a man walking in the distance. She was more puzzled than frightened that anyone else would be in the woods that early in the morning.

‘Oh dear, God, please don’t let it be Irving,” she prayed. She had forgotten that he also had property in the area. She had lived in the city long enough to be cautious, so without changing her pace she made a U-turn around a big stump, whistled for her dog, and started back toward the house. When Bappy didn’t appear, she stopped to wait for him. For a few seconds she could see neither dog nor man, and was beginning to wonder if she had imagined the person. Then he appeared much closer. Part of her was relieved to see that he was too large to be Irving, but she quickened her pace and silently cursed her dog.

“Mandra?” He called to her, using a childish nick-name that she hadn’t heard for years. She stopped.

“I’m sorry, I can’t remember your proper name,” he said as he strode closer. “I thought it was you that I saw in the store last night, but when I came outside to ask you had already left.”

“You have to be the Cameron girls’ younger brother. I’m Cassy now, for Cassandra, and I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name either. What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for the spring,” he said simply. “I’m Steve.”

“I actually meant what are you doing in this part of the world after so many years, but I’m also looking for the spring. It must be around here somewhere.”

“The one we named Loyal?” he asked. “That was the year all four of your girls read Anne of Green Gables, and gave a name of some sort to every twenty feet of the creek.” After a pause, he said, “I hope I didn’t frighten you.”

“No, I was more afraid you might be Irving. Of all people, I didn’t want to see him. Do you remember Irving?”

“Yes. He still has one clean lens and a phobia about a drop of water on his person. He sold his whole outfit about a year ago, and went to live with relatives in another state. I bought those five acres he had in back of your land; remember the lane?”

“Why did you want those five acres?”

“Because, combined with your springs and creek, it is the prettiest woods in the whole world. Or will be, when no one lets cattle in there anymore. The only other people interested in his property were some big-time developers, and I didn’t think they saw it in quite the same way.”

They both searched for the spring as if it were a matter of life and death. She inquired about his sisters, and he gave a brief summary of each sister’s life since high school. She tired and he noticed. He pointed out a log they could sit on and rest awhile. They looked out over the lake.

“When we learned my wife was terminal, she wanted to move back to the lake,” he explained. “So I took early retirement. By the time of her death, two years ago, I had found plenty of work in the new construction across the lake. I stayed with the intention of building a permanent home for myself here. I have already remodeled the farm-house for a vacation home for my sisters and their families, and that’s where I am living now. We each kept a few acres of the former farmland, and have come here often.

“Did you know I made a lifelong career of building houses?”

“No,” she answered. “And my husband probably installed the cabinets in some of those houses, and never knew we were childhood friends.”

“Well, anyway, that’s what I am doing “in this part of the world,” as you said. What are you doing here?”

“My long-term tenants bought a home for their family, and I felt I needed a change.” She couldn’t tell him about her mood swings, her Isp, and her strong desire to get away from herself. She looked at her watch. She was surprised to see that several hours had passed, and they both started walking back toward home.

“I hope you didn’t plan to sell your woods?” he inquired. She was a little puzzled by the question.

“Oh, you mean about the developers. I didn’t even know about them before you mentioned it. I really don’t know what I plan to do with my life, but I would never sell my woods!”

They followed the stream from the upper spring to a few feet from where it joined Short Creek and never found another stream.

“I’ve been wondering how you recognized me after so many years?” she asked. “You were still in high school when my grandmother died, and you were never around here on my rare visits since then. I’m surprised you even remembered me.”

“Well, I never forgot you because you went to bat for me when the big girls didn’t want me tagging along. You told them you’d planned on playing “Little Women” and you’d need a Laurie. From then on my sisters were a little more charitable about finding a place for me in their games.”

“Oh yes. I remember that day. You got over-tired just like they said you would, and I had to carry you home on my back while all three said ‘I told you so.’”

“To be honest: My sister Alice has a more recent picture of you. Your dog followed me the first night you were here; I read his tags. The next morning he found me in the woods, so I followed him.”

On their fourth day of searching, she wondered aloud why they both though it so important to find that spring?

He looked a little embarrassed, stuttered a little, such as he had when he was a child, and said, “There’s something sacred about water that bubbles out of the ground just because it wants to.”

That same day she mentioned her inner subtle problem, the Isp. Then he talked of his, only he called it the “Alp,” for Annoying Lingering Pest.

Cassy was incredulous! “You mean other people experience the same thing? I thought I was on some obscure planet inhabited only by me.”

“Do you mean in almost two years you never went to any bereavement support group? Several people in my group mentioned something they couldn’t describe. It seemed to be an individual thing – everyone attributed it to something different. Spousal bereavement is different than losing a parent or grandparent.”

Then he jumped up and said, “Hey!” and kicked aside some brush and dug with his boot heel through two inches of topsoil. Underneath was the big flat rock that they had used for a stage when they play-acted. He kicked over another rock and showed her where the snakes had hibernated. Then he moved dead leaves.

“Look here,” he said, and pointed to the signs. “This year the Mayflowers will surely bloom in April. Every year we are surprised anew when spring arrives, when underneath the woods’ natural cover it has been happening for a long time.

“It is the same way with human life. We who are left alone are never completely cured of our grief, but we heal. The healing begins long before we know it. It happens a lot faster if we can focus on some definite plan for the future. I already have my focus – the building of my two houses, and my part-time job that leaves me with the time to build my own. You will find your focal point soon, I’m sure.”

She didn’t tell him that she already had. In time she would sell the old house near the city – Buddy’s house – and move to the lake. Her Grandmother’s house – her house – needed only a little remodeling. To Cassy, the light breeze sifting through the trees already sounded like the laughter of her grandchildren and their friends running through the woods.

Cassy stayed an extra week. They never found the spring that had once been called Loyal, and it didn’t matter. They found dozens of signs of earth renewing itself. With her new interest in life, she had found and exonerated the Isp. And although neither of them knew it at the time, they had found each other.

The End


Historical notes for family/interested parties:

Typed by Grandma, about 5000 words, probably while she was attending her writing class in the 1990s. Re-typed by Erica, with minor changes to punctuation and spelling (hyphens, compounds).

This fictional story is based on the real-life experiences of several women, including Grandma Enid McCaffery Ritter, and her mother.

Estelle Alma Bragg McCaffery did receive an unwelcome proposal during the gathering for her husband’s funeral, while her daughter Enid was right there listening. There was also a man in town who had one dirty lense and one clean on his glasses, because he was blind in one eye, although they may have been two different men.

It was Enid’s father Bill McCaffery who didn’t want them to spend any money on a fancy casket or arrangements – but he was dead, so the family did as they pleased. All she could think about as they lowered him into the ground was how many things he could have made out of that beautiful wood.

The rototiller incident is fiction.
Enid and Ray Ritter did have a big garden for a while, much bigger than they could use, and shared the produce with neighbors. Ray did most of the tilling. Once when they were gone for a short while, they came back to find the garden had been worked on by an anonymous helper.
Of course, in the fictional story, the men weren’t laughing at Cassy, but at their own secret plans for the work-party. “People used to do those sorts of things for each other, you know. Nowadays it seems like nobody has the time.”

“So many people have different talents, you know, and what one person can do another person can’t.”

The golf course is local, above the Columbia Slough near the Ritter house in the Cully neighborhood of Portland. There were paths around it that people were welcome to walk on. There may still be.

The woods with three springs is from Grandma Enid's childhood memories of the Beechwoods property, near Stanley Wisconsin. Beechwoods was a man, a friend of her fathers', who gave his blessing to four generations of McCafferys roaming through his woods and creeks as though they owned the place.

Other memories may connect with this story in time, but for now, this is what I know.