Chapter One

I was approaching my sixteenth birthday when my father, Walter Cramby, walked out on my mother, Maryanne Cramby, and our lives were forever changed. My brother, Josh, was at the end of his thirteenth year. 

To add to my mother’s woes, she was laid off not long after that from her job as a fifth-grade school teacher in the suburbs of Detroit.  “Cut backs,” they said.

Fortunately, my mother was in possession of a recent, sizable inheritance from her grandmother who managed to survive her husband.  My grandparents were killed in a car accident when mom was in her teens.  My great grandmother finished raising her.   She was a spry old woman who we thought would never die.  In fact, we wondered if she might outlive us all.  Because of that inheritance, we weren’t destitute while she searched for work.

Unfortunately, it took mom a while to get her act together to even look for employment.  She spent months sitting around feeling sorry for herself with a bottle of Jim Beam as her companion.  I was seventeen before mom pulled her head out of the bottle and things started to look like they might normalize. 

Whether it was because she needed a change in scenery or that she’d made a scary dent into the inheritance money that we’d been living on, I’m not sure, but she decided to move us to the small city in upstate New York where the little farm my grandparents had left her was located. 

She managed to secure a job in a nearby small-town teaching middle grade English and drama. Since our house was nestled in the hills outside of this ridiculously tiny city, the commute to it or the even smaller town was fairly close in drive time and miles.  I remember her smiling as she told me this little tidbit of information while declaring that we had the best of both worlds this way.

I did my best to cooperate with her and not fuss overly much about the move, but it was difficult to leave my lifelong friends. To this day, I question if mom ever considered the impact dad’s leaving had on Josh and me. 

I don’t think she did.

Because she was employed there, Josh would be allowed to attend school in that small town rather than the small city.  My mother’s shocking excitement about this fact actually blinded her to the reaction she got from both Josh and me.  We weren’t inner city kids, but we weren’t small town either.  In fact, the nearby community that they deemed a mountain city wasn’t as large and the suburb community we’d come from. 

I’d already graduated, but Josh still had three years to go.  He just couldn’t believe he’d have to spend it in a school with a total enrollment for grades seven through twelve of two-hundred and fifty-one students  after attending a school that had nearly seventeen hundred students in grades nine through twelve. 

I couldn’t blame him for being unhappy.

Josh took our moving to the country better than I did, which surprised me since he’d always been the one to rebel and complain since birth. 

Since I was only seventeen when I graduated, I promised my mother I’d stay home with her for a year before I went off to college; if that’s what I decided to do.  I’d had my fill of school and was still debating about it.  Because of that promise, I had no choice but to make the move with them.  If the truth be known, I didn’t feel equipped to go out on my own quite yet, anyway.  I just wished she could have waited to make this move for one more year.

We moved into grandmother’s old estate house just one day after school let out for the summer.  We’d tripped over boxes being packed for a few months while mom decided what to pack up and move, what to sell, and what to give away to charity.

We ended up living out of suitcases for the last two weeks of school and slept on air mattresses since our household belongings headed east before us.  Mom wanted everything waiting for us when we arrived.  It was, but it wasn’t unpacked.  That took another week.

I was surprised at how much didn’t make it to the old farmhouse until I got to see inside of it and realized that it was already completely furnished with my grandmother’s belongings.  Needless to say, mom did more sorting, storing, selling, and donating for the better part of the summer until we eventually fit the house – or should I say the house eventually fit us?

I hated the fact that we’d moved from the hustle, bustle, and convenience of urban living to a mountain top set between a tiny city and a tiny town, but I loved the house and the grounds.  It was huge and had an air of grandeur. 

I’d expected an old farmhouse; which is what mom called it.  Instead, I set my eyes on an enormous white brick, two story estate house that was surrounded by bright red outbuildings and a red and white stable with neat wooden fenced pastures strategically placed on one-hundred-twenty-five acres of land that was surrounded by forest belonging to the state.    Even with the lack of grooming that occurred while the house sat empty, it looked majestic.

My bedroom was actually a suite that offered a sitting room along with an ensuite bathroom.  Large French doors opened onto my own private balcony.  The balcony was small, but it was all mine with the only access to it being through those French doors.  It was a far cry from the nine by fourteen-foot bedroom I occupied in a three-bedroom, one bath ranch on the one-hundred-fifty by one-hundred-foot lot we’d left behind.

There was even a swimming pool, although sorely neglected.  Mom didn’t think she’d be able to resurrect it that summer, but she promised to have it up and running for the following year.  Since it was cooler in the mountains of New York than in the suburbs of Chicago, I didn’t mind.  I wasn’t much for cold and wet.

Once I’d unpacked my things and done what I could to help mom, I found myself searching for something to do to occupy my time.  It was decided that we’d all relax and acclimate to our new surroundings over the summer.  Mom was insistent that I didn’t need to look for work during the year we’d agreed that I take off.  We had plenty of money and she’d also be adding to it with her job.  She expressed her appreciation for the way I stepped up to the challenge and cared for things while she drank herself silly and insisted I take the year to rest and enjoy life for a bit before I worried about what I’d do from there.

The television cable company didn’t run that far out into the country and we’d yet to get a satellite installed. This meant that the only television we had to watch was what we were able to pull in with an antenna and there was absolutely no internet to connect our computers to. Mom purchased a mobile hotspot to hold us over, but she monitored the minutes like a hawk watching its prey. Her only response to our complaints was to tell us that it was good for us to go without for a while. We lived in a beautiful countryside and we should be out enjoying nature instead of being on snapchat or I*******m.

We’d been there for two weeks when three horses were delivered.   For the first time since I’d learned of the move, I was genuinely happy.  I’d been taking weekly riding lessons since I was ten and they were one of the things I missed the most.  Of course, taking a lesson once a week and having the horse on your property to care for on a daily basis were entirely different experiences, but I was undeterred by the responsibility that was given to me.  In fact, I was excited.

I took a few days to settle the horses in.  It turned out that they belonged to the estate, but were being boarded while the estate was empty.  They’d basically come home.  Therefore, it took minimal effort for them to settle back in. By day number three I was exploring the hills on horseback.

I felt happy and free.