What We Do With What's Left

The farmhouse had been in our family for five generations. My grandmother died last month and left it to me and my sister equally, which meant we were either going to have to agree on what to do with it or kill each other trying.

I was betting on option two.

"We could sell it," Vanessa said, standing in the kitchen where our grandmother had taught us both to cook. "Developer from Charlotte's been calling. Wants to put in vacation cabins. He's offering three times what the land is worth."

"This land isn't worth money, Van. You know that."

"What I know is that I have a mortgage in Asheville and two kids in private school and a husband who just got laid off." She turned to face me. "What I know is that this place has been rotting for fifteen years because Gran couldn't afford to maintain it and neither can we."

She wasn't wrong about the condition. The roof needed replacing. The plumbing was forty years old and showed it. The porch had a soft spot where you couldn't walk without feeling the boards bend underneath you.

But she was wrong about what the place was worth.

"You don't feel it, do you." It wasn't a question.

"Feel what?"

I pressed my palm against the kitchen wall. Warm under my fingers, even though the heat wasn't on. Humming with accumulated everything. A hundred years of meals cooked in this room. Births and deaths and Sunday dinners. The particular love of women who'd fed their families from this exact spot, pouring pieces of themselves into the food and the walls and the air.

"Grandma was a practitioner, Van. So was her mother. So was her grandmother. This place is saturated with five generations of them giving pieces of themselves to these walls."

Vanessa stared at me like I'd announced I was joining a cult.

"Not this again."

"You know it's real. You've known your whole life, even if you pretended you didn't."

"I know our grandmother believed weird things. I know you've always been way too into her stories. I know none of that matters when I'm looking at a roof that costs more to fix than I make in six months."

She walked out of the kitchen. I heard her footsteps on the stairs, heard her moving through the bedrooms above, probably calculating square footage and resale value.

I stayed where I was, my hand on the wall, feeling everything she refused to feel.

We'd been different since we were kids. Not just the usual sibling stuff.

Vanessa was practical. Grounded. She saw the world as it presented itself and dealt with it accordingly. When something didn't fit into her understanding of how things worked, she filed it under "things to ignore" and moved on.

I was the opposite. I felt things I couldn't explain. Knew things I shouldn't know. Our grandmother had recognized it in me when I was five years old, had started teaching me what it meant, had given me words for the sensations I'd never been able to describe.

"You're like me," she'd said. "And your great-grandmother. We see the underneath."

Vanessa didn't see the underneath. Vanessa didn't want to.

And now we were standing on opposite sides of a divide that might cost us our grandmother's legacy, or our relationship, or both.

That night I walked the property.

The farmhouse sat on sixty acres of North Carolina foothills, most of it forest now, reclaimed from the tobacco fields our great-great-grandfather had worked. The trees were old. The saturation was older.

I stopped at the stone foundation of a building that hadn't existed in my lifetime. The original homestead, according to family history. Built in 1892, burned down in 1923, never rebuilt.

The saturation there was thick enough to choke on. Grief and loss and something else underneath it. A fierce love that hadn't faded even after a century. The people who'd built this place had poured themselves into every stone.

Vanessa found me an hour later, wrapped in Gran's old coat, sitting on the foundation.

"You're going to freeze."

"I'm fine."

She sat down next to me. For a while neither of us said anything. The moon was up, casting silver light across the hills. Somewhere in the distance, an owl.

"Mom used to say Gran was psychic," Vanessa finally said. "Remember? When we were little. She'd make jokes about it but I could tell she wasn't entirely joking."

"Gran wasn't psychic. She was a reader. She could feel what places held."

"And you can too."

"Yeah."

Vanessa was quiet for a long time. I could see her processing, fitting this information into the framework of a world that didn't have room for it.

"What does this place hold?"

I hadn't expected that question. For a moment I didn't know how to answer.

"Everything. Five generations of women loving their families hard enough to leave pieces of themselves behind. The grief when great-grandpa died in the flu epidemic. The joy when gran was born. Every meal cooked in that kitchen, every fight forgiven in the living room, every bedtime story told in the upstairs bedroom."

I paused, looking at the foundation under us.

"And this. The original house. There's something here I don't understand yet. Something old and heavy. Like a promise that never got kept."

Vanessa pulled her knees to her chest. Even in the moonlight I could see her skepticism warring with something else. She'd spent her whole life not believing, but some part of her must have always known.

"If I sell this place to that developer, what happens to all of it?"

"It gets hollowed. Excavated. The new buildings go up and whatever the land held gets drained or scattered. Within a decade this place would feel like everywhere else. Just empty land with buildings on it."

"And if we don't sell?"

"The saturation stays. Maybe grows, if we treat it right. This place stays a place instead of becoming just another piece of property."

I turned to look at her. My sister. My opposite in so many ways. The person I'd fought with more than anyone else on earth.

"Van, I know you need the money. I know your situation is hard. I'm not trying to guilt you into anything. But I need you to understand what you'd be selling."

She stood up. Brushed dirt off her jeans. Started walking back toward the farmhouse.

Then stopped.

"I felt something. When we first got here. Walking into the kitchen."

I waited.

"It felt like Gran. Like she was still there somehow. I told myself it was grief, just my brain playing tricks. But it felt real."

"It was real."

Vanessa turned around. In the moonlight her face was hard to read, but her voice wasn't.

"I can't afford half of this place, Maggie. Not on my own. If we're going to keep it, you're going to have to figure something out. Some kind of arrangement where I'm not drowning."

"I'll figure it out."

"Promise?"

I thought about the foundation under my feet. The promise it held that I didn't understand yet. The generations of women who'd given pieces of themselves to this land.

"I promise."

It took six months, but we worked out a deal. I'd take the land. Vanessa would get the Atlanta apartment Gran had left us, which she could sell and pay off her mortgage. We'd split the costs of fixing up the farmhouse, and she could come stay whenever she wanted, which we both knew would be almost never.

The morning she drove back to Asheville, we stood in the driveway and did the awkward thing siblings do when they're not sure if they should hug.

"Take care of the place," she said.

"I will."

"And call me if you figure out what's in that foundation. The promise you kept talking about."

"You actually want to know?"

She shrugged. Tried to look casual and failed.

"I've spent forty years pretending I couldn't feel things. Maybe it's time to stop."

I hugged her then. She was stiff at first, the way she'd been stiff with affection since we were teenagers. Then she relaxed.

"Thanks for not selling."

"Thanks for letting me keep it."

She got in her car and drove away. I watched until the dust settled, then walked back to the farmhouse.

My farmhouse now. My responsibility. My inheritance of accumulated love and loss and everything in between.

I had work to do. A roof to fix and a promise to understand and a lifetime of learning what this place really held.

But standing in the kitchen, feeling the warmth of five generations humming through the walls, I knew one thing for certain.

Whatever else happened, this place would stay in the family. The saturation would survive. The love that had been poured into these walls wouldn't fade into some developer's vacation cabins.

We'd figured it out. Vanessa and me.

That's what sisters do.