Over time, more and more people started making the development where my parents bought property into their permanent home. The HOA boards began changing the rules. Plat owners could now only park a trailer or an RV on their lot for fourteen consecutive days. A period of time had to pass before the campers could return with their trailer.
The family that we shared a septic and light pole and a well with started coming up to the development less and less. Their open weekends didn't seem to coincide with our open weekends. The families stayed in touch, traveling across town for Sunday dinners or weekend barbecues but after a while, neither talked of the property as much anymore. The one story they did talk about was the day we dug out the puddingstone. It became a metaphor for something not accomplished but tenuous.
'Let me tell you, getting that taken care of was a real puddingstone.'
'Our oldest boy has gotten himself into a real puddingstone.'
'The HOA is making this place into a real puddingstone.'
Still, whenever we visited the property, my mother would check on the puddingstone at the front of the adjoining lots. From the growth over the area the neighbors had cleared to park their trailer, it was clear they weren't visiting the site any more.
Then came word that my dad's property buddy had died. Cancer. We saw the wife and daughter once after that. We never saw them at the property again. The neighboring cottages never got built.
The summer after the death of our neighbor, we went up to the property. Patches of purplish-blue forget-me-nots spread over the neighbor's lot. My mother wept.
This was at a time when my folks would park the trailer on the lot for the two-week maximum stay. My dad would commute from the property up north to his job, leaving at around three a.m. on a Monday and return around ten p.m. on a Friday. Sometimes the entire family would leave with him around two a.m. so he could be to work by nine.
We were pulling a ridiculously large Shasta. It slept eight. Twin sleeping benches in the aft with bunk/lofts overhead, a fold-down dinette bed forward and a double fold-down bunk over that.
A few years after the Forget-Me-Not visit as it became known, my mother, nephew, and I were staying in the trailer with my aunt, my twin girl cousins, and my grandmother. I was in high school by then. Ninth grade. My nephew and the twins were in sixth grade. By my senior year, the four of us would wind up in the same high school when my aunt moved closer to us.
My mom stayed at the trailer with my grandmother while the rest of us walked down to the beach access to swim/bathe because that was what you did back in the day to wash the stink of camping off of you when your trailer didn't have a shower. When we weren't wave-riding on inflatable tugboats and rafts, we were doing a little rock hunting until my aunt reminded us we had to carry everything back up the hill, including the inflatables.
We started getting hungry. My nephew and I carried the tugboats. They were bigger, bulkier. There was a small raft in the back and a pilot house with a smokestack in the front. The girls carried the rafts. My aunt lugged the two bags of stones.
I could tell something was wrong because we could see my mother and grandmother out in front of the lots. The trailer sat back from the road and wasn't easily seen. I think my dad parked it this way to avoid complaints filed with the HOA.
My mother and grandmother paced in tiny circles. He picked up our pace. None of us could run. Our legs were like pillars from the swimming and rock hunting and the trek up the hill.
My aunt asked what was wrong and my mom, angry, upset, on the verge of tears explained that while she and my grandmother were sitting in the trailer playing cribbage, they saw a car go by on the road where we all stood. The road dead-ended to the west of our lot in a circular turn-around area. Shortly after it passed, the car came back stopping outside the neighbor's lot. My mother said she could hear people talking. She thought she heard someone say 'Put it in the trunk.' Then a slam. Then car doors closed and the car drove away. It was then that my mother and grandmother went out to see where the car went which could have only been east at that point before turning either north or south and since we were coming from the north and no car passed us, it had to have gone south for about a hundred feet then east again as the hill road ended at the bottom of another hill where U.S. Twenty-Three followed the outer edge of Michigan.
My mother had not been troubled by the case or the people that had gotten out of it. We were surrounded by many empty lots. People were always looking at potential property purposes. What had riled my mother the most was that the talisman that had come to first symbolize their friendship with their property neighbors and later a monument to the passing of their friend, that puddingstone we'd spent an afternoon excavating and two dads loaded into the trunk of a car, and then unloaded back at the property, that very stone was gone.
We didn't all carry phones back then. The only phone available to us was in the clubhouse two miles down the hill and to the west. My aunt asked my mom if she was sure she had seen it when we arrived. Mom was adamant. Of course she'd seen it. The first thing always did was check on it.
I was pretty sure she hadn't. I had stayed with my dad to park the trailer and set up camp while my mom walked everyone down the road to the beach access. I didn't bring this up because I saw the way she exploded at my aunt.
We had to go, my mom declared, and find the car she saw.
My aunt asked what kind of car it was.
Brown, or yellow. Maybe gold.
How many doors?
My said she couldn't see. The trees were in the way. She heard a slam and maybe three doors close.
What did the people look like?
Some lightweight cursing. A reminder of the trees blocking the scene.
Male voices or female voices?
Just voices.
My grandmother could not corroborate any of this.
All right. So you want us to go walking around this development, looking for a brown or yellow or gold car with two, maybe four doors, driven and ridden by people with voices who may or may not have taken a rock.
Puddingstone and they took it.
How are you going to know? Are you going to walk up to every door, knock on it, and ask, hi did you steal a puddingstone?
If I have to.
Then what?
I'll tell them to put it back.
This is not happening.
We're going.
We're hungry. We're tired. We don;t even know they took it.
Of course they took it. It's gone.
I'll go, I said, after I eat.
None of us went.
For the next two days, my mother sat in a lawn chair at the front of our drive watching the east end of the road, willing her phantom car to pass. If she needed a break, one of us had to sit there. Twice she set out on her quest to knock on doors and twice she returned within ten minutes.
My dad surprised us by arriving early on the Thursday of that week. He was a little perplexed to find my mom sitting guard. We watched the scene unfold from the trailer. She took my dad over to where the puddingstone had been. Yes, it was gone. What could they do?
She wanted him to drive her around looking for the car.
They got in the Suburban. They were gone for about an hour. When they returned my mother took her lawn chair to the firepit and sat down staring at the campfire we built to cook hotdogs skewered onto a kind of barbecue pitchfork. She sat there for a long while in silence. My dad handed her. a cold can of pop.
Friday morning we went into town to have breakfast at a riverside diner we liked. My mother. went directly to the pay phone to call our property neighbor's widow to tell her about the stolen puddingstone. She wasn't gone long.
My dad asked her how it went.
It turned out the neighbor's oldest son had gotten it the previous fall. The puddingstone was safe in her backyard all along.
As I write this, I still have no clue as to what my mother heard or saw that day. I do know there is a shiny black rock with white lines shaped like rectangular boxes set inside one another in the pewter ice bucket that we called the Ethel Stone to conjure up the story of the Great Fake Puddingstone Theft.
Stumpstone Quote of the Day:
"Mrs. Delacroix selected a rock so big she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. 'Come on,' she said. 'Hurry up!'..." Shirley Jackson/ The Lottery
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