Page 32 - Where the Dream Ends ebook

Marc Erdrich

They climbed over a stone wall, and out onto a field with
Tissie in the lead. Harry and his wife could barely keep up with
her. They climbed to a ridge that gave them a three hundred
and sixty-degree view of the surrounding countryside.

“All of this is Hay Bridge,” Tissie said, casting her arm in an
arc around them.

Harry turned to encompass it all and he found himself gid-
dy with another kind of ground-based dizziness that he could
not explain. He put his arms around Tissie and his wife and the
three of them stood enraptured until it was time to go home.
* * *

How Harry and his wife came to stay with Tissie at High
Hay Bridge is another story, but suffice it to say that some
seventy years earlier Tissie was a student at a Connecticut
girls’ school where Harry’s wife now worked; at the annual
fund-raising auction — Harry was away on business and didn’t
attend — his wife bid on and won a two-week stay at High
Hay Bridge in the Lake District of England, put up by Tissie
herself. The price wasn’t cheap, and his wife was nervous about
telling Harry, but she had nothing to fear. Harry was ecstatic.
The thought of spending two weeks in the land of Wordsworth
and Coleridge was the stuff of dreams.

It was three more days before Harry and his wife finally got
to see the gypsy wagon up close. They could have gone soon-
er, but when Tissie told them a family was staying for several
more days, they waited.

Harry climbed the steps to the door, unclasped the lock and
went in. The interior was disappointing. It reminded Harry

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