Moss, Rust, and a Horse Saddle

I’ve been picking at this essay for a few months. It’s about my trip to Oregon last spring, but every time I sat down to write, I froze — trying to make it sound like “good writing” instead of just telling the story.

Last week I went back to Oregon, spent a couple days with Aunt Nancy, and she gave me the exact piece of advice I needed: stop writing for some imaginary audience and just write it for myself. By the time I got home Tuesday, all the stuck parts had somewhere to go.

So here it is. Big thanks to Aunt Nancy for shaking me loose. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Grandma Connie (GC) was getting by until Otis died. Dropped dead of a heart attack when his truck broke down in Coos Bay. I can see him now — tie-dye shirt under his overalls, cussing at the engine because it was making him late to take GC to lunch. And Otis was never late. Not in some self-righteous way. He was just a man who kept his word. That was his currency.

It’s been a year since he passed. GC moved in with her sister Nancy the day he died. Alzheimer’s had been creeping in for years, though GC still jokes that she moved in “to take care of Nancy.” Her house across the street has been sitting empty ever since.

Last spring, I flew out to go through their things and get the place ready to sell.

When the dumpster arrived, it hit the ground with a wet slop that shook the house and scared two deer out of the neighbor’s driveway. I was standing in ankle-deep grass that had stopped pretending to be a lawn years ago, each blade tall enough to hide something — which it was. Tires, buckets, barrels. Hidden inside the growth like oversized Easter eggs, each one holding its own surprise of rainwater, mud, moss, and the occasional hat.

My “waterproof” shoes gave up within minutes, squelching with every step. Wet socks are high on my list of personal hells, but there wasn’t much point in caring once the first puddle got me. In the middle of the yard, an upside-down truck cap sat on bricks, overflowing with soil and weeds. Nancy told me Otis once grew lettuce in there.

“Best lettuce I ever had,” she said.

I believed her.

Coos Bay doesn’t do vacancy. The rain never stops — it just changes speed. On the rare sunny day, everything green goes feral. Grass shoots up a foot. Blackberry vines throw loops around anything nearby. Rust blooms in streaks across every scrap of metal. Moss moves in on anything that stays still — fences, tools, the brim of a Packers hat that had been hanging on the same nail for who knows how long. By the time I got there, nature had already called dibs.

I found the proof everywhere: a rusted bike frame locked in a chokehold of grass, missing its front tire; hundreds of plastic planters crumbling into something between trash and dirt; a riding mower swallowed by ivy; buckets turned into slug terrariums; a stack of warped plywood growing a full mushroom library. Everywhere I looked, moss was working on Otis’s things the way Alzheimer’s was working on GC — slow, quiet, inevitable. First the edges, then the structure, then everything.

The first time I saw this place, I was eighteen. I’d flown out alone, excited to see GC’s “magical” world in person. As a kid, she visited us every year when my parents went on vacation and would spend hours on the phone with us the rest of the time. She’s one of the biggest influences in my life — the kind of person who leaves fingerprints all over who you turn out to be. All my friends, from every stage of life, have heard some version of the GC and Otis story.

Otis, though, was a legend. I’d grown up listening to GC tell stories about him. He once hitchhiked across the country, from Oregon to Maine. Another famous story was that he chose state prison over county jail because the county would’ve made him cut his hair. I knew the myth, not the man.

Back home in Pennsylvania, I’d been raised with a cop for a dad, an addiction counselor for a mom, and a steady diet of D.A.R.E. assemblies in school. But on my first night in Coos Bay, Otis walked me out to his greenhouse. He slid open the door and there they were — rows of marijuana plants under warm grow lights. Next to them, gallon Ziplocs stuffed with dried bud. Then we smoked together.

It didn’t feel wrong — not here. Otis was just showing me something he was proud of, like a perfect vegetable garden. I was fascinated. And standing there, with moss climbing the fence and rust eating through an old wheelbarrow, Coos Bay felt like a place with its own rules. And Otis belonged to it.

Now, as an adult, I know how it sounds when I tell people: “My grandma lives off disability” or “my grandpa grew the best pot in town.” Outside their bubble, those lines land different. But in Coos Bay, it’s just GC and Otis, living the way they wanted. They didn’t care what anyone thought. They were happy. And that was enough.

Otis’s yard was full of contradictions — things that looked like junk until you knew the story. Eleven tires because he refused to pay the four-dollar disposal fee. A horse saddle with no horse. A barrel of racing methanol no one could explain. Decades of High Times magazines. The Packers hat hanging in the doorway, waiting for him like he might still grab it on the way into town. You could build his biography out of the objects alone. Maybe that’s what hoarding is — writing your life in physical form in case someone wants to read it later.

By the end of the week, the dumpster was full and the yard still looked like it was winning. The realtor took her photos and put the house on the market. It sold. GC’s now in assisted living, closer to Nancy. She’s eating better. She has friends. Things feel better.

A few days later, I was headed to the airport to fly home. The deer were back in their yard, nosing through what was left of Otis’s biography. Most of it was gone now, hauled off or buried in the dumpster, but a few lines remained — the truck cap, the hat, a single tire half-sunk in the grass. Give it a few weeks and you’d never know I’d been there. That’s the thing about the stuff we collect, and the memories we attach to them — Mother Nature eventually reclaims it all. All you can do is enjoy them while they’re still yours.