Excerpt: Livie Owen Lived Here

I heard the whistle blast at 9:15. Funny, the thought that struck me wasn’t that the whistle had stopped blowing years ago, but that it should have blown at six. There was a time when the whistle was as reliable as the opening and closing of the hardware store or the passing of the ten o’clock train. The whistle used to rattle the windows and frighten the cats of Nabor every 6 AM and 6 PM for decades.

That was, as the older folks say, “way back when.” Used to be, everybody in Nabor who didn’t work at the hardware store worked at the paper mill, and the whistle told them when to come to work in the morning and when to go home at night. Then one day the whistle blew at 6 P.M. and everybody went home. The next morning, the whistle didn’t blow, so nobody ever came back.

Nabor – with an A – is my town. Nabor is also the neighbor to Neighbor – with an E – which is the town everybody’s heard of. Neighbor-with-an-E boasts a college and a Super Wal-Mart and several law firms with names like Schubert and Schubert and Williams and Williams and the less-popular Williams and Schubert. Nabor-with-an-A? Well, Nabor-with-an-A boasts that it is Neighbor-with-an-E’s neighbor. We’ve got a stoplight and two stop signs, a closed paper mill where the stray cats run wild.

And me. Olivia Owen. Former neighbor to just about everyone in Nabor.

You don’t have to believe me. You can look. Open a door. Peek through a window. It almost doesn’t matter which house you try; it won’t take you more than a couple of blocks. You’ll find Livie Owen Lived Here written on the walls of over 30 dwellings in the county. It’s the only sentence I ever learned how to write.