There is a particular quiet to a Monday morning in the hills, and I had known it for more than forty years before the morning it broke.
My name is David Jones, and I have always thought of myself as a simple man. For more than four decades I lived on the same piece of land in the hills outside Knoxville, a quiet property at the end of a narrow county road, woods on one side, a steep embankment on the other, a weathered mailbox by the entrance with a small flag bolted to it that I replaced every few years when the weather wore it out. I raised my family there. I watched my children take their first steps across the living room carpet. I taught my son to throw a baseball in the front yard, the two of us out there until the light went and his mother called us in. I celebrated birthdays and Christmas mornings and Thanksgiving dinners and graduations and anniversaries on that land, all the ordinary small moments that turn out, when you add them up at the end, to be the most important parts of a life.
When my wife, Margaret, passed away two years before that Monday, the house stopped being a structure made of timber and brick and plaster and became something else. It became a sanctuary. It was the only place left in the world where I could still feel her. Some mornings, walking the hallway before the sun was fully up, I imagined I could catch the faint trace of her perfume. When the wind moved through the trees outside the kitchen window, I could almost hear her laughing somewhere in the next room. The land was not dirt and grass to me. It was a lifetime of her.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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