Essay About Ghost Town

The Wise Women turned in at a reasonable hour, but a wedding prevented me from getting a good night's sleep. On the pool deck, electrical guitars played until late, the music floated just below intolerable. The bass thudded a constant beat that carried my mind everywhere but slumber. While the Bride and Groom were surely off enjoying themselves, the friends and relatives in attendance celebrated in style and children ran wild in the halls. The beer bottles that litter the hotel lobby attest to the party spirits as Holly Jo and I leave the others behind to snooze. Our destination this morning is the town of Herman where Grandma Epperson lived.

Traveling to Grandma Ollie's each summer was the Korth equivalent of returning to Harper Lee's Maycomb, Alabama. A town stuck in another century, where we created Huck Finn and Tom Sayer adventures in true Mark Twain style. Herman was a lazy town populated by widows,

The grocery is on the east side of the road and the co-op on the west. No lights. No stop signs. In our youth the road was lined with DeKalb corn signs, waves of amber grain, and bustling tractors. We see none of these as we roll into town. I wonder if it will become a ghost town once the current residents die off, becoming an empty shell on the highway that is the northern snow-route out of Omaha. Grandma Ollie's house is where we'd left it, on the last street on the north end. The current owners have put up a garage and moved the propane tank closer to the house. The screened-in porch that ran the length of the house is still there, and the cemetery at the crest of the hill. But the Buick-sized deep-freezer that always sat on the porch is gone and the vegetable garden has been turned back to lawn. Nothing looks familiar except the grayness and flaking paint. We see no residents and there aren't any cars on the streets. We park and photograph Grandma Ollie's house with our