Keep it Simple: A wonderful old house and a wonderful old soul
I only met Lillie Bell Simpson once during her 98 years here on the planet, but I would have liked it to have been more than our one brief visit almost two years ago, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
One of the first things she asked me during the visit to our old Elmira Township farmhouse was if the trapdoor in the dining room, which had gone down to the Michigan basement, was still in use when I had bought the house back in 1976. I laughed and told her it didn't. I told her when my wife and I moved here the only way to get down to the basement was via the back steps. She laughed and I too laughed once more. It was a warm June day and she had come to our house with her son Charlie and daughter Kathy, two of the seven children she had raised in town. I was interviewing her about life growing up on a farm. The article appeared a few weeks later in the Herald Times.
Lillie Bell knew about the former trapdoor in my dining room and a lot more about this old house in which my wife and I had raised our three children and have called home now for more than 45 years; one year longer than Lillie Bell's parents, Ray and Ellen Moorehead, who had owned the old homestead for 44 years, beginning around 1917.
The reason Lillie Bell knew so much about our house is because she came into this world Aug. 9, 1923, and was born in one of the four bedrooms which, over the years I had gutted and renovated, like much of the rest of the house. It was a good place to raise our three children and for the next couple of hours, during my visit with Lillie Bell, she told me it had been a good place for her and her seven brothers and sisters to grow up in as well.
She told me about a small garage by the side of the road where her father had set out metal cans of fresh milk to be picked up and taken to the dairy in Gaylord for bottling. She told me about several other outbuildings; including a potato barn and woodshed, which, like the small garage, were no longer a part of the landscape.
She told me about the joy she had in riding with her father and his team of horses; Trevor and Topsy, which he used to work the fields of the family dairy and potato farm. It made me think of my oldest daughter and how, as a very young girl, she rode with me on the orange Allis-Chalmers tractor I used to prepare the garden for planting in the spring.
I thought of how Lillie Bell and her sisters probably played with dolls in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the same rooms my two daughters played in with their Barbie dolls. The same rooms both sets of children likely laughed and giggled into the night when they should have been sleeping, causing their fathers to stand at the stair landing, informing them they needed to get to sleep because there was school in the morning.
Since her visit I have sometimes have the feeling the soul of that little girl who grew up here in the 1920s and '30s lingers about in this century old house; helping with the canning, doing the dishes, or picking a basket of fresh green beans from the garden. I admit it's a bit comforting to think she is still about.
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Lillie Bell passed away last month in Gaylord, not far from her childhood home here in Elmira Township, and I have to believe, based on the short amount of time I spent with her, it was a life filled with joy, happiness and a sense of accomplishment. Stop by anytime, Ms. Simpson; you are always welcome here.
— Michael Jones is a columnist and contributor for the Gaylord Herald Times. He can be reached at mfomike2@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Keep it Simple: A wonderful old house and a wonderful old soul
