Our house, mine and Roger's, is built on land which my great-great-grandfather bought and was handed down from one to the other until it ended up from my mother to me. For which I am very grateful....20 acres far back in virgin forest with no mortgage and a good well is indeed a rich legacy, even without anything else.
And there is much more.
The Big House that belonged to Sam Carson in the books is a much more opulent place than our old homeplace. But the layout is approximately the same. The library is to the right of the big front doors; the front doors do have stained glass inlaid; the parlor does have doors that adjoin it to the next room...big double doors on either side of the fireplace that the family opened when they had a party to make more room for dancing. There are big French doors from the parlor and the dining room out to the side porch, and a long piazza that runs the front of the house.
The library does have the glassed-in bookcases, there is a winding stair to the next floor. There is a long, sweeping lawn and the view of the mountains is sweet. And there are odd happenings in the creaky old place. But there the similarities end.
The billiard room in Carson's house is where the dining room is in our house. The stairs in Carson's circle up three floors, you can look straight up and see the sky-light at the top. The second floor landing leads to a wide hallway with a carpet runner to the left east wing, then two steps higher to the right leads to the west wing where the guest suites were kept in precise order by Esther Carson. These things all change after the disaster described in "Two Marriages", but that is another story.
I came upon an old letter last week, written by my great-aunt in the 1920's. It was in among my mama's things in our storage and in it she tells that she is staying at our Big House for several weeks. She also says:"But I don't mind being by myself. Being alone here doesn't bother me as is does some people."
It would seem that maybe the odd happenings and strange feelings within our family's Big House were happening then, too. No one knows why these things happen, why some of us in our family feel the way we do within the wonderful old place at certain times, but, for my part, it is undeniable. No, I haven't seen any apparitions; it is an uncomfortable feeling in certain rooms. A strange, uncomfortable feeling. It doesn't happen all the time; it is not dependent on time of day or season. It is simply there.
In later books of the McKenna Chronicles, I go into this oddity in more detail, letting a few characters come face to face with it. I try to explain why it is in the house...Ginny has a theory or two. I'm not sure how I am going to oust it from the Carson Big House, or if I'll just leave it alone.
One thing about the Carson Big House that is not accurate to our homeplace is that there is a secret winding staircase hidden in one wall. This is revealed in one of the later books, so, although this is a bit of a spoiler, it doesn't have much significance...yet. Roger and I often speculated that there were secret panels in our family homeplace, fed by the historical reality that much of the family silver, hidden from an approaching Yankee army during the civil war, was lost. We often thought that maybe it was hidden in a secret room within the house. We would go around tapping on walls and peeping into alcoves in the attic for hidden doors. No such luck.
The Carson Big House, however, has a secret door to a narrow winding stair that leads to nowhere. Schuyler Carson McKenna knows about it, she reveals it to Boone during their courtship and no one knows why it is there or why it leads nowhere.
That remains to be seen.
For the past couple of years, in the fall when the mountains are aflame with color, the McKenna Chronicles host an event at our Family Big House. It is called Books and Biscuits at the Big House and it is what it says: breakfast and open house up in the hills at the original Big House where books are discussed, tours are given, new writings are read, and we can sit and rock in the rocking chairs on the porch for awhile. Not many people are invited; trusted fans are picked carefully. If you get an invitation, you must be kind of special to the McKennas.
So, read on....