NAELA News August, 1999 - National Academy of Elder Law ...

NAELA News ● August 1999
PERIPATETIC
ESSAYIST
“Living Art”
by Clifton B. Kruse, Jr., Esq.
A small
adobe home,
dirty white with
blue accents surrounding
two
small windows,
old and enduring
stood picturesque
at the top
of a steep incline,
100 yards north Clifton B. Kruse, Jr.
of the one-lane
dirt road where I’d parked my car. It was
precisely 3:00 o’clock and my client, a
tiny 92-year-old widow, was standing in
its doorway, leaning on a walker, the kind
that has wheels on its front pedestals. A
cell phone was laying in a basket-carrier
strapped onto the front brace. She
was waiting for me, and had her phone
with her in the event I called to cancel.
“You could have driven up,” she said
as I approached, but that was not the
instruction she had given to me by phone
earlier that day. “Park on the dirt road,”
she’d said, “and walk up the hill to the
adobe. Don’t go to the big house to the
west,” she’d instructed. The great house
was used only for storage these days. It
held her large art collection–one numerous
charities in the city knew about and
coveted.
Her two homes were hidden on 37
acres of hilly, rocky soil north of the
state university, a homestead she’d
purchased after leaving Indiana soon
after her graduation from college
there. She’d built the adobe in which
she now lived. But that was long ago,
near three quarters of a century, and
now the tiny hovel, suffering from
both age and inattention looked
humble, and appeared unsafe.
“Take the interstate until you
reach High Bluffs Parkway, turn right,
east, until you see Vulture Haven
Road; it’s gravel. Go three-quarters of
a mile north until you come to the
© Clifton B. Kruse, Jr.
three branches in the road. Take the
left branch. It’s a dirt road; go a few
hundred yards until you see my place.”
At that point she’d told me to park on
the single lane in front of her home–
the adobe - and walk up the hill. I
obeyed. She’d given clear instructions
confidently, and had obviously described
this same route to others. She
has it down pat. The “branches” she
described, however, were not like a
three-hole candelabra. The first branch,
wandering northward was a full block
from the second, a roadway to the right
which headed back in the direction of
the city. I didn’t continue forward to
find the third, but rather headed back to
the first turn, branch one, I assumed.
Why hadn’t she said, “Take the first
left?” It had been more than awhile
since she’d been on the road, I imagined,
and she’d compressed the
distance among these options in her
memory. It’s time again for her to
revisit the long dirt road entrance to
her home and recompose the
instructions. But I’d left the
office early knowing of
my own navigational
deficiencies, so I
wasn’t late.
Inside the
adobe was one
large room. It
held a stained
hardwood table, her
desk, where she read and
took her meals. Condiments and a rather
new deck of playing cards and piles of
mail, her filing arrangement for letters
she couldn’t discard, took up most of the
table’s surface, but she’d cleared a space
for me, room enough for my yellow legal
pad.
My client’s bed was three feet to the
right of the table-desk and was being
used today, at least, as an extension of
the hardwood. Small piles of papers that
I might ask to see were laid neatly on
the blanket that served also as the
spread.
The home’s single room contained
a small refrigerator and an apartmentsize
stove. Two baskets of canned goods
were on the floor; stove, refrigerator
and the larder were all in a windowless
nook that jutted out from what was otherwise
a small, rectangular house, behind
and to the right of the desk, her
kitchen space. A closed door near the
bed I surmised was the home’s bath. An
overstuffed chair was to the right of the
door. But that’s all there was. From
where I was seated I could see everything
in the home, and it looked to me
like a child’s perfect playhouse. There
were a few pictures nailed onto the
walls, but nothing I would call art, and
certainly nothing that mirrored the photographs
of the art collection that decorated
the main house. The photos had
been recently taken by the appraiser.
His report, a thick volume, perhaps two
inches in an 8˚ x 11 notebook, was on
the bed. We looked at the photographs
and I enjoyed her collection vicariously,
as did she. It is now impossible for her
to make her way down the hill to the
dirt drive, and up another stony grade
to the home where she and her husband
had lived–the hideaway for her precious
collection. The photographs
and her memories
were enough now. I saved
for another visit the
story she must have
about the art. She
made no offer to
discuss it. Her
existing will
provided for its
next home–a provision
that was to be reaffirmed
in the draft of what may, in
truth, really be her Last Will, the one I
am now to create. Lifetime gifts of the
paintings to her charities which would
result in income tax benefits to her now
were not broached; her paintings,
hoarded in the big house were her stillinfant
children. For undiscussed and
not disclosed reasons it was obvious to
me that her great prizes, notwithstand-
(continued on page 21)
20