The same attorney is retained to help me with Mom’s estate a few years after Uncle Pippi’s will was contested after his death and that court case closed.  “Estate” is a grand word for a little nothing and it doesn’t fit this situation.  However, I need to use the sale proceeds from Mom’s little condo to partially pay for her assisted living expenses.  I want to do it the right way, the legal way, the honest way.  I can’t do it any other way, because that’s just me, and “estate” is the grand, technical, legal term that I’m forced to use.

After several meetings with the attorney, I shyly tell her my idea with Pippi’s story – my story – my book.  She encourages, then says that she will pray for me.

Just like that, God opens the door and pierces my soulful house.  God comes to me through the attorney, and as wacky as that sounds, thank you, dear, sweet Jesus.

She tells me that she likes the idea that I’m “going through the back door” to tell my story.  With the words “back door,” I imagine Aunt LaLa’s back door, the little slate porch, and the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times I’ve opened that door to enter the kitchen of Grandpa, Nanny, Uncle Pippi, and Aunt LaLa’s home, the porch just steps away from the lucky, four-leaf clovers hidden in the grass, and the cheerful zinnias that bob their heads hello.

“Hi, Aunt LaLa!”  If she’s not in the kitchen, my words zip, zip, zip through the house, to find their way to her.

“Hello Uncle Pippi,” I shyly say and he smiles at me.

The back door, back door, back door.  The back door that welcomes me, the one that’s always open, the one that is heaven-sent.

I get off Exit 10 on the I-95 thruway after I leave the attorney.  I haven’t been this way since I withdrew the court case because I couldn’t muster up my God-given strength to even look at Aunt LaLa’s house or Uncle Pippi’s garden.

I do it this time, take my time, drive slowly through the neighborhood.  It feels safe, as it always has.  Quiet roads, nothing much changed, many of the same, old homes of my childhood, the prettiness of it all, a nibble of kids play in a yard, a mom strolls a baby carriage, another collects envelopes from a mailbox that sits on a green pole.

I stop at the garden.  It’s messy.  Pippi would not be happy.  Someone has a garden here, however, he’s a sloppy gardener.  Haphazard tomatoes in uneven rows.  Short cornstalks grow along the barbed wire fence, their longing leaves try to escape.

When I visited Aunt LaLa at a nursing home a while ago, she told me that a cousin bartered with a landscaper, exchanging lawn cutting for use of the garden.

The hill where the house sits is overgrown with weeds.  A United States of America flag hangs flatly on the front door, the red and white stripes vertically down.  It is still.  It is lonely.

The house and the garden tell me to hurry, hurry, hurry.  Time is running out.

I rest my car at the stop sign directly across from the driveway of the house.  I see everything as it is, but feel everything as it had been so long ago.  The air exhausts and weighs me down.  As I drive past a cousin’s house a few blocks away, tears explode.

The house and the garden tell me to hurry, hurry, hurry.  Time is running out.  I must hurry, hurry, hurry, for Pippi and myself.