EDITOR'S CORNER: IOWANS STUMBLE UPON RETIREMENT 'EDEN'

"How'd y'all manage to find that old place you're fixin' up?" I've been asked. I've related the story of our discovery several times.

It goes like this: We looked at several places in Missouri to which to retire when the time came in 1999. We had been disappointed several times when looking at property which did not quite measure up to the descriptions in real estate ads.

But in April of 1998 we took a long weekend to come to Southeast Missouri to look at land that sounded promising: 100 acres of undeveloped land with mature timber and a lake. And it was beautiful, all right, but very remote with a creek to drive across for access. And we would be left with just enough money to buy a tent to live in. I could not tell you today if it was in Cape or Bollinger County that's how many twisting, hilly roads we drove on.

As we left the area, however, we decided to drive to Burfordville on our way back to our motel in Jackson -- Burfordville had been my late mother-in-law's birthplace. My husband, Bob, had visited the town when he was a boy, but I had never seen the place.

We approached the small town -- there were perhaps two dozen houses, maybe less, and turned onto the main street. Through a thick curtain of maple trees, I saw a large white house, an old house, one with eaves troughs hanging to the ground, sagging wrap-around porch and peeling paint. Broken venetian blinds and tattered curtains hung at the windows.

I gasped. "Oh, what a beautiful old home," I said. "Why is it just sitting there unlived in and unloved?" There were no signs of life, no real estate signs, but I did notice the lawn had been recently mowed.

Slowly we drove past the place, stopping the car in the road to stare at the old house. We had left the melting piles of snow and ice, the browns and cheerless grays of late winter Iowa. And here was this fine old home, surrounded with leafed out trees and lush green grass. Flowers were blooming and the songbirds were everywhere. It was Eden.

We returned to our motel so I could get my camera, and returned to take photos of the area. As we approached the house we noticed a pickup parked in its drive with a gentleman standing near it. We began visiting with the man, told him how much we admired the old house, and I asked him if he knew the owner of the place. "Why yes, ma'am," he replied, "I own this place, and if y'all'd like to look around, go right on ahead."

Bob and I climbed the steps up to the old screened-in back porch that sprawled across the width of the huge old place. Entering the dark, musty-smelling, long-empty place I saw the cracked and dried linoleum on the floors and the large tatters of wallpaper hanging from the walls.

Silently, with our footsteps echoing, we walked through the desolate yet once-beautiful place, each carrying our own thoughts.

I was looking at the old fireplace with the mirror and wooden mantle over it, the pocket doors separating the parlor from the large formal dining room, the soaring, open staircase with the window seat on the landing overlooked by a stained-glass window, the large bay windows in the dining room which were also carried out upstairs in a bedroom. I looked up at the high ceilings with picture rails and fine molding.

Together, Bob and I admired the woodwork and wainscoting which had never had a coat of paint and probably still carried the original varnish. There were so many doors and over each was a transom window.

The ornate front door with a large oval beveled glass window opened into a roomy foyer where another door opened onto a small room which was probably a reception area at the turn of the century. The front porch floor was rotten and sagging, but the large white columns and rail and spindlework around it were sturdy.

Upstairs, we found four bedrooms and a small room which may have been a sewing room, and more stairs going up into a third floor an attic-room with dormers looking out over the beautiful hills and gorgeous trees. There was also a bathroom with the original plumbing including a claw-footed tub and wooden water closet with pull chain going to the commode. Another narrow set of stairs went down into the kitchen.

The old house had probably been built in the late '90s or the early part of the century, I thought, and had been empty for at least 15 or 20 years, and yet it had never been vandalized or stripped of its woodwork or fixtures.

We took a peek at the limestone basement and saw an old beast of a coal-fired boiler that would have operated the radiators we'd seen upstairs. (It would be six months before we learned that the limestone basement was actually much older than the house, in fact, about a hundred years older. It had probably been built around 1800 for the first structure to sit atop the foundation, the home of George F. Bollinger, Missouri statesman and Cape County pioneer.)

The land around the old home sloped gently down to a spring, a small creek and across the creek a tall hill arose covered with oaks and maples and sycamores, all part of a state park, which included a covered bridge and an old mill a short distance away.

While Bob was looking over things, my mind had been busy with its own pursuits as we closed the door of the house. The owner of the place was waiting for us by the driveway, accompanied by his little poodle-dog with the purple bow in her topknot.

"Well, what did y'all think?" he asked. Bob said it was sure a nice old house and this was really a pretty part of the state ... I interrupted him.

"Would this place be for sale?" I asked.

"Why, yes, ma'am," he answered, "I've never listed it with the real estate people because I'm stubborn and independent-minded, but yes, it's for sale."

I glanced at Bob who was staring at me as he began to get a glimmer of what I was leading up to. "What kind of money are you thinking about?" I asked casually. He named a figure and the wheels in my brain began to speed up. We visited with him a few minutes more, thanked him for his time and left the little town.

We were both quiet on our drive back. And then Bob blurted out, "It'd take a lot of work to fix up, you know."

I perked up. "Oh I know, but we'll be retired with plenty of time and it's such a pretty old place. I love this part of the state, it's neat and clean and progressive without losing sight of history and tradition."

He reached across the seat and held my hand, "The minute I heard you gasp when you saw that old house, I pretty much knew how this was going to end," he said.

A week later after once again making the eight-hour drive from Iowa, we were sitting at the gentleman's kitchen table signing papers making us the owners of the house that time forgot.