This happened April 2, 1978 before about 11 A.M. at the Little House on our place.
Photos of the Little House
BACKGROUND: The land we live on was originally John Elon Howe's homestead land. He's my great-grandfather on my mother's side. (Aunt Eve is on my father's side.) After J.E. Howe's daughter Elsie died, the land went to her children, including her daughter Irene, my mother.
Aunt Eve had been widowed and then worked as a nanny for many years and then needed a place to live. That's when my parents let her have a corner of our place (my mother's land, for one of my father's relatives--very generous) and built the Little House for her in the 1940s.
Aunt Eve was active into her 90s and then became very elderly and ill and kept falling and getting injured. The deeds were redone with the assurance that it was her house for as long as she'd need it. However, when she was gone, it'd be my house. (My parents wanted one of their kids living on the place due to the fact that they were getting elderly and would need a caretaker.)
Aunt Eve was a few months short of 103 at the time of this story.
Aunt Eve was in a nursing home in Bellevue and not likely to ever come home again due to failing health, so I had been allowed to stay at the Little House as long as the house remained unchanged in case Aunt Eve needed to come back. (I was 23 and I needed to move out of the family home for at least part of the time, no matter what rules I had to stick to.) So, I was keeping the tiny little house, 400 square feet, clean, and the mice shooed out. I was also befriending the big long-haired calico cat named Molly who'd lived there for a decade and had been Aunt Eve's pet since she was a kitten.
On April 2nd, I remember it being sunny, though my diary says clouds and rain. I do remember I was working in the garden part of the time, so there had to have been times when it wasn't raining and maybe had sunbreaks. (It was April, the weather here varies in April. Wait five minutes, it'll change.) Aunt Eve had kept a nice little garden of flowers and I liked tending the flowers.
I also must say that the phone line was arranged so that it rang at both houses. It was a double ring for one house and a single ring for the other. (Don't ask me which was which, I don't remember.) This means I would have heard a call for the other house ringing. The door was open, I was in the garden directly in front of the door barely 20 feet from the phone. I did not hear a call. That's oddity number one, because there WAS a phone call during that time -- an emergency phone call. (At that time, an emergency phone call was the phone equivalent of the letter edged in black of the earlier generation--basically, it's an alert that someone you know has died.)
Oddity number two was the behavior of Molly cat. She'd be sitting down and then she'd jump and look behind her. She was so nervy that I finally gave up trying to be in the garden because her behavior was unlike any she'd ever had before (or ever again). She was acting like someone was touching her. Only I wasn't and no one else was there.
It was a little later, after the end of the phone call that I hadn't heard ring, that my father came down and told me that Aunt Eve had died that morning.
Maybe it was a ghostly visitor who was patting her cat, while visiting her little house and yard?
If it was, I'm certainly glad that I'd had the house absolutely neat and clean and that the garden was as nice as I could get it. I wouldn't have wanted her to come back to find her little home a mess after all.
