Pigeon

For the Fourth of July I made a visit up north to my hometown of Pigeon. It is a small farming community in the Thumb of Michigan. My house is located just north of town…in fact my backyard is what separates the town from our house.

My backyard and the off to the left Pigeon Co-op

Our house has been in our family for 99 years (it’ll be 100 years on April 20th, 2007…my 26th birthday). I’ve always felt a special attachment to the house…perhaps because we both became Elbings on the same day.

My home...isn't she beautiful

So let me share my favorite story related to this house. When my grandma lived in this house she had told the family that every 10 years a ball of light would engulf the house, condense to a small ball in front of the upstairs window (the one in the middle of the picture), come into the house, go down the stairs, and turn off her television. My grandma passed away and our family moved into the house. One night, about 2 years after moving into the house, I was walking to my bedroom in the dark (I rarely turn hallway lights on in the house…even to this day). All of a sudden the entire house was surrounded in light…I could see bright light from every window. I knew something was weird because the light was different then when a car passes by the house. I was staring straight out the middle upstairs window when I saw the light condense down to a ball just outside of the window. Suddenly it shot through the window and hit me in the stomach. At this point I know anyone who doesn’t know me will think I'm crazy, but when I looked where the light had hit me I could see through my stomach. This obviously totally freaked me out, and I proceeded to run into my sister’s room and shake her. I continued to shake her until my mom made it upstairs to pull me off. To this day I don’t know what happened, but it certainly is the freakiest thing. The following day we asked the neighbors if they noticed anything unusual about our house the previous night, and they said that our house was all lit up.