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four large rooms, or “pens” as they were called. There were two rooms down and two up on either side of a wide central hallway. The front door was on one end and the door to the back yard, the kitchen, smokehouse, and apple cellar at the other.
    For some inexplicable reason one of the previous owners had cut off the roof and turned the two upper rooms into an attic. The windows had even been boarded over. With the loss of the upstairs, succeeding residents started expanding to the sides and the back. The smokehouse and apple cellar had been torn down to make room for an indoor kitchen and a huge wrap-around screened porch. When my grandfather Sterling and my father purchased the farm they added more bedrooms. It was also thanks to them that we had electricity and indoor plumbing.
    To say the result of all these architectural additions was a hodgepodge of style was a great understatement. But somehow, through it all, the house maintained a certain elegance and beauty and I dearly loved every little nook and cranny.
    Certainly there were plenty of bedrooms and lots of privacy. It was a good night for privacy. We were all exhausted. Cassie was getting surly, and Mother was enunciating even more clearly. We said our goodnights and went to bed. Cassie went to her room dragging a nighty on the floor like she did when she was three. All she needed, I thought fondly, was her Pooh bear.
    I was too tired to shower so I just splashed warm water over my face and brushed my hair back. I ignored the perky little toothbrush standing in my old “Wonder Woman” water glass. My stomach was totally beyond being able to handle anything as minty as toothpaste. I took off my clothes, threw them in the direction of my open suitcase, and pulled on a nightgown.
    The big four-poster bed was the same one I had since my sixth birthday. It was still high off the floor but I had not used the little bed step since that first year. When I pulled the bedspread back, I had to smile. Bless Mother’s heart! “Spare no expense where comfort is involved,” is her motto. Underneath, a pretty lace trimmed plissé blanket cover protected a soft, silky Pima cotton summer blanket and luxurious four hundred thread count sheets. Everything was a lovely feminine shade of pink. I felt like I was curling up in cotton candy. I stretched and yawned and settled back.
    After about twenty minutes I realized that the soft old mattress which had cradled me for so many years and the fancy new bed linens had failed to lull me to sleep. I changed positions fifty times but nothing doing. I finally got up, slipped on a light robe and padded barefoot into the library. I quietly opened the French doors, grabbed a down cushion off the sofa, and lay down on my stomach in front of the screen door. I had been very silent in all of my movements and none of the crickets or croakers stopped their songs for a moment. A big cloud covered the moon. I could hear but not see the rustling of the leaves by the soft breeze.
    I thought about all of the summer nights long ago when Velvet and I had escaped through our bedroom window to run barefoot and pajama-clad in the wet grass in search of adventure. We found it in daring to be up and about when all the world was sound asleep. As children, we never gave a thought to the snakes that surely must have come out of their cold damp holes to warm themselves against the stone walk still warm from the sun. Nor did we think of the wild foxes that came down the lane to hunt for a juicy baby bunny meal in the hedges near the house. I suppose, had we not been so full of giggles, we might have heard the desperate squeal of a mouse in a nighthawk’s beak or the squeaking of bats circling the chimney. And occasionally there must have been the horrid child-like scream of a rabbit being disemboweled by a big barn owl.
    But those were adult thoughts, and I remembered none of that now. I did recall vividly how the roof shingles held