Sunday, July 13, 2008

We now interupt your regularly scheduled reading (again) ...

... so I can go off on a subject wholly unrelated ...

I want you to meet Edith Macefield, who died not so long ago.

Ms. Macefield lived a pretty interesting life. But it was the very end of it that we've come to discuss today.

You see, Ms. Macefield lived in her tiny house, with the glass animal figurines in the tiny windows, until the very end of that life. What's remarkable is what she did when change came to her block. To become her next-door neighbors, in fact.

You see, a multi-use structure was to be erected on her block, to consume her block in fact, and everyone else sold their homes to make way for it. Except Ms. Macefield.

She held firm to her convictions.

But the noise! people said. Eh. She lived through World War II. A little noise wouldn't be anything.

OK, said the developer. We'll give you a million bucks. Eh. No thanks. What would she do with a million bucks? She had everything she needed.

So Ms. Macefield lived in that tiny house as the bigger building went up around her. She kept her home neat and clean, and the yard well tended with its one tree, and she parked her old blue car out front. And that's where it remains, even after her death.

No one, even the construction foreman who befriended her, knows what is to become of the tiny house.

Ms. Macefield, however, had a will. What's in it is still to come.

Don't believe this story is real? Maybe you think it's just a version of the 1942 tale by Virginia Lee Burton, called "The Little House: Her Story?"

No. This story is true. Don't you believe me? How about now: