The house was old and mildewed and sat, at least a hundred years old, maybe older, on the hill into the once prosperous town of Milton. But had since gone to ruin and overgrowth and dimmed windows crusted with dust that looked out now on empty streets and vacant lots where once children had run and played baseball.

The town was haunted, though there was no one to know it. Except perhaps the birds that lined the elms along Franklin Street, or the wild dogs that lived in the watershed at the edge of the broken down bakery plant over on Carson where the dirt road had once been pavement and had run all the way to the Lancaster onramp for the new freeway fifty years before.

Until the docks downstream on the Missouri had expanded and had taken all the traffic that had once run on the paved road. And the years of neglect had settled in and the road had gone back to dust and dirt and intersected on the east side of the old town where the Canton house sat.

And days were empty stretches of heat and silence and the background sound of insects chirping. Crickets rubbing their legs together and the sound of straw grass blowing in the hot wind and rocks sometimes cracking it got so hot.

Nights were cold, and full of owls hooting, full of bats at the edge of fruit trees and baying dogs. The house would sit, door locked as it had sat locked since Claire Henderson had lived in it and raised her children and patted their bottoms in the morning when they didn't want to get up and go to school, or hug them and kiss them and press her lips to boo-boos when they fell down and skinned their fingers or their knees.

Her hair had been red. As red as the carpet in the living room that Rance, her husband had filled the house with when he bought the house and married her and brought her there and they went in and up the stairs to the top of the old victorian staircase to the top bedroom and made love like romance novels always tell us that lovers do.

The wind blew in the old house through cracks in the glass, that let in rain and wind and the old carpet is stained now and full of moss and decay, but the memories still cling to the wallpaper in the hallways and in the upper rooms where Claire had called her children so often, that after fifty years gone to the Lord, you could almost still hear her voice and the sound of her whispered lullabys to the babies.

Down stairs Rance would sit with a paper and read the news of the first world war, and later, his children grown and with children of their own would come out and sit on the old dried couch and chairs downstairs while their wives would try and decide what to do with all the old boxes in the attic after the funeral, and whether or not they could take it all. And what they would do with it if they did.

And here and there is the scrape of a heel on the walk outside, an almost sound that is sure to make it into a scary story if it were heard. But it is only the memory of Standish, who was Rance's oldest son, pacing his grief on the porch when his son Clement had not come home from the war.

The pacing and pacing.

The sound of the hurt and the sound of branches rubbing in the cold evening wind and the house settling and the glass tinging as it sometimes did when it got so cold that the glass seemed to pop.

All those sounds rising in the evening like an almost Chaikovsky sonnata that is played for piano.

Claire had played.

But none of her children learned and so the instrument sat in the living room of the old house and the strings popped in the dry heat after the years went by until there wasn't a string left in the old grand that wasn't broken.

But with day, the silence of the heat settled down again, leaving the old sounds, the creaking sounds, the almost and once were sounds all left for the almost night, when we could almost remember all those years ago.

But even birds will migrate, and the wild dogs grow old and die and the bushes out beyond the old bakery are empty now and the walls are so thin and crumbled down that not even the dust is young enough to remember any more.

And that perhaps is the saddest part.

That those old memories are gone, even the wind is a new wind, full of ocean promises out of the far west.

California! Says the wind loud and rushing down the middle of the country.

In the new towns and old towns. But mostly in the new towns where new memories move and settle and grow and breath and catch their fill of smiles and daylights and nights where a young man bends on his knee before a young girl with red hair and opens a box with a ring in it and asks for her hand.

The girls name isn't Claire, and she doesn't marry the boy, but another one, ten years on and they try three times to get pregnant but are unable and finally frustrated and feeling almost defeated they adopt.

And she holds her new ten year old son in her arms as night comes on and sings to him.

Lullabys.

And even the wind remembers then.

And would smile if wind could smile. When the young mother kisses her son's forhead and he falls asleep with her arms around him. And is secure.

And loved.

And he never goes to war.

But sings songs to his son's and the wind remembers.

And he remembers.

And he strokes the red hair of his daughter as he sits in an apartment a thousand miles from Milton.

But feels the same as Claire and her husband Rance did. And all their children and their childrens children scattered out so far that we have lost count.

But that is alright.

We still love them, even though they've gone out and away.

The wind blows.

And almost sounds like a whisper, sometimes.

But maybe that is just imagination.

Do ya think?