Elisha Schmidt

Elisha Schmidt Contact information, map and directions, contact form, opening hours, services, ratings, photos, videos and announcements from Elisha Schmidt, Gaming Video Creator, 118 E 17th Street, Goodland, KS.

09/07/2026

"My husband turned cold and aggress:ive the moment I refused to move in with his parents. He pointed at the door, furious, and shouted that I should pack everything, take our son, and get out of his house for good. I said nothing. I gathered our clothes, our documents, and every last thing that belonged to me and my child, then left before he came home from work. But when he finally walked through the front door that evening, he froze in sh0ck. The house was full of strangers because that house had never legally belonged to him.
My husband turned cold and aggre:ssi:ve the moment I refused to move in with his parents. He pointed at the door, furious, and shouted that I should pack everything, take our son, and get out of his house for good. I said nothing. I gathered our clothes, our documents, and every last thing that belonged to me and my child, then left before he came home from work. But when he finally walked through the front door that evening, he froze in sh0ck. The house was full of strangers because that house had never legally belonged to him.
My name is Lauren Mitchell, and until that day, I had spent six years convincing myself my husband’s temper had limits. I was wrong.
It started in the kitchen that morning, just after breakfast. My son, Noah, was coloring at the table while I rinsed a coffee mug. My husband, Derek, stood near the counter with his arms crossed, repeating the same demand he had been pushing for weeks. His parents had sold their condo in Tampa, and he had decided they were moving into our house in Columbus by the end of the month. He never asked. He announced it like a business decision already approved.
I turned and told him, calmly, that I would not live with his parents under our roof. His mother had criticized everything from how I cooked to how I raised Noah. His father treated me like unpaid staff every time they visited. The last time they stayed over, his mother walked into our bedroom without knocking and told me a good wife woke up earlier than her husband. I had tolera
That phrase almost made me laugh, because the house had been purchased two years earlier with money from my late grandmother’s estate and held through a family trust she had set up for me before she died. For tax and lending reasons, Derek had been allowed to think the paperwork was “just formalities,” but legally, his name had never been on the title. My grandmother had been a careful woman. She had adored Derek when we got married, but after watching how controlling he became during my pregnancy, she quietly changed the trust instructions and told me never to forget whose roof truly protected me.
So I didn’t argue. I packed.
By noon, I had called my attorney, my cousin Melissa, and a licensed property manager connected to the trust. By three, I had movers at the house, a locksmith changing the codes, and legal documents being reviewed at the dining room table by two men in suits. When Derek arrived home from the office at 5:47 p.m., expecting me to be humiliated and gone, he opened the door to a house full of strangers working under my authority...

09/07/2026

Mom told me her anniversary dinner started at nine, so I arrived at 8:55. They had already finished eating. My sister slid a $5,300 check toward me and said, “You weren’t invited to dinner. You were invited to pay.” Mom laughed. I didn’t argue. I simply called the manager over and asked, “Remember what I requested earlier?” He nodded—and my sister’s expression changed immediately...
A month earlier, I had honestly believed the dinner might be the beginning of something better.
Dad called me on a Tuesday night while I was sitting at my kitchen table in Tucson grading junior essays. We had barely spoken for weeks, so when his name appeared on my phone, I watched it ring twice before answering.
“Rosie girl,” he said.
That alone softened me.
Nobody else called me that.
“Your mother and I hit forty years next month,” Dad continued. “We’re having a dinner. It would mean a lot if you were there.”
Then he said something I had spent half my life pretending I didn’t need to hear.
“It wouldn’t feel like forty years without you in the room.”
So I agreed.
A week later, Mom called with the details.
La Vista del Sol, a beautiful resort restaurant in the Catalina foothills.
Private terrace room.
“Nine o’clock,” she said.
“Nine?” I laughed. “You and Dad usually eat before the evening news.”
“That’s when the room is available. Everything is arranged.”
The next morning, she texted me.
Dinner starts at 9:00. Terrace room. Don’t be late.
She even added a little red heart.
I saved the message.
Maybe because things between us had been strained for months.
Maybe because hope makes you sentimental about tiny things.
I bought a blue dress.
Found an anniversary card.
Then restored the only surviving photograph from my parents’ 1986 wedding.
In the original, Mom was twenty-four, standing outside the church laughing so hard her eyes were closed.
Water damage had been slowly spreading across one corner for years, so I took it to a restoration shop near the university.
Sixty dollars later, the stain was gone.
My mother was laughing beneath a clean Arizona sky again.
I wrapped the frame in brown paper and placed it on my kitchen table.
That was the gift I intended to carry into their anniversary dinner.
The irony was that my family had spent years teaching me to arrive with something far more useful than a gift.
My wallet.
I’m thirty-six and teach high school English.
I earn a normal teacher’s salary, drive an aging Corolla, and spend weekends grading essays while my sister Courtney lives a very different life in Scottsdale with her husband, Preston.
Courtney always appeared financially comfortable.
Beautiful house.
Pool.
Expensive restaurants.
Trips.
But whenever our family ate out together, something strange happened when the bill arrived.
Courtney suddenly never had a card.
“Oh, Preston has them.”
Or:
“I switched purses.”
Then the check would sit in the center of the table.
Nobody directly asked me to pay.
That would have required admitting it was a favor.
Instead, Mom would smile at the server and say,
“Rosie’s got it. She always does.”
And I did.
Birthdays.
Mother’s Day.
Holiday brunches.
Family dinners.
The amounts grew larger, but the expectation never changed.
I was “the strong one.”
That label started when I was twelve.
I fell from the bleachers during P.E. and ended up with my arm in a bright blue cast.
Dad came to the clinic because Mom was busy helping Courtney prepare for a piano recital.
When Mom finally arrived, she looked at me sitting there quietly and smiled.
“See? You’re the strong one. You don’t need all the fuss.”
At twelve, I thought that meant I was special.
At thirty-six, I understood it meant I was convenient.
Still, family habits are difficult to break.
A few years earlier, after Dad had to slow down his small HVAC business, Mom asked whether I could help with household expenses.
“Just temporarily,” she said.
Four hundred dollars a month.
“Send it to Courtney,” Mom told me. “She handles our online bills.”
So I did.
Every first of the month.
For years.
The transfer note always read:
For Mom and Dad.
Then one afternoon, while fixing Dad’s laptop, he proudly showed me the small spiral notebook he carried everywhere.
Dad recorded every kindness anyone did for him.
Dates.
Amounts.
Names.
“A man should know what he owes,” he always said.
He opened to one page.
Water heater — $1,100 — Courtney.
“Your sister handled that,” he said proudly. “I don’t know what we’d do without her.”
I stared at Courtney’s name.
By then, I had already sent thousands of dollars through her account.
“Dad, does Mom ever mention the four hundred I send every month?”
He frowned.
“Four hundred?”
That answer changed something inside me.
I went into the kitchen.
Mom was drying dishes.
“Dad thinks I give you fifty dollars here and there.”
Her towel kept moving.
She didn’t ask what I meant.
That was the part I remembered later.
She already knew.
“Your sister has pressures you don’t understand,” Mom said.
“The money is mine.”
“It goes toward family exp....
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09/07/2026

My 10-year-old daughter suddenly collapsed at school, and I rushed her to the hospital alone. Then a pale nurse ran toward me and said, “Call your husband right now.” When he arrived and the doctors told us the truth, neither of us could speak.
Spring had just reached our quiet Seattle suburb. Rain tapped against the kitchen windows before sunrise, the coffee maker hissed, and cherry blossoms were beginning to open along our street.
From the outside, our life looked ordinary—a house, a marriage, and one child who was supposed to be safe.
Emma was ten. Curious, kind, loud when she laughed, and always afraid she had forgotten something important.
That morning, I packed her lunch, fixed the loose strap on her backpack, and watched her hurry downstairs with her school uniform half-buttoned.
“Mom, what if I forget everything during my math test?”
I brushed a curl away from her face. “You studied. You’ll do great.”
She smiled, but it was smaller than usual.
For weeks, Emma had been eating less. She complained about headaches and came home exhausted. I kept giving those symptoms harmless names—stress, growing pains, too much homework.
I was a nurse. I knew what warning signs could mean. But knowledge feels different when the patient is your child. Fear can make even someone trained to recognize danger reach for the easiest explanation.
Michael had already left for work. His early meetings, late nights, and phone calls he stepped outside to take had become so normal that I had stopped asking questions I was afraid to hear answered.
At 2:17 p.m., my phone rang during my hospital shift.
The number belonged to Emma’s school.
“Mrs. Johnson, your daughter collapsed in class.”
Everything after that blurred together—the scrape of my chair, my shoes pounding down the hallway, my keys shaking in my hand.
When I reached the school nurse’s office, Emma was lying on a cot, pale and barely able to keep her eyes open. Her fingers were cold. Her backpack lay open beside her, one math worksheet sticking halfway out.
“Mom,” she whispered.
I lifted her carefully and carried her to the car. Every red light felt personal, as if the whole city had decided to stand between me and my child.
The emergency team moved fast. A blood-pressure cuff tightened around Emma’s arm. Monitor leads crossed her chest. One nurse checked her pupils while another drew blood and repeated questions because I kept losing my place halfway through every answer.
For years, I had stood beside frightened families and helped them stay calm.
Now I could barely remember how.
Then a nurse came toward me so quickly that I knew before she spoke that something was wrong. Her face had gone pale, and her mouth was pulled tight.
“Ma’am, call your husband right now. He needs to get here immediately.”
My stomach dropped. “Why? What’s going on?”
“There’s no time to explain. Please—just call him.”
My hands shook so badly I nearly dropped my phone. Michael answered on the fourth ring.
“It’s Emma,” I managed. “Come now.”
While we waited, rain streaked the window beside her bed. The monitor kept beeping with cruel steadiness. Emma’s hospital wristband looked too large around her small wrist.
When Michael finally arrived, he came through the doors breathless and gray-faced. He looked at Emma, then at the nurses, as though he were trying to figure out how much they already knew.
A doctor followed him into the room holding the first test results.
“There are abnormal substances in your daughter’s system,” he said carefully.
Michael gripped the back of a chair.
I stared through the glass at Emma, trying to understand how something dangerous had entered the body of the child whose lunch I had packed that morning.
Then the doctor looked directly at both of us.
“We’re going to have to notify the police.”
Neither Michael nor I spoke.
But for the first time, I had the terrifying feeling that our silence meant two completely different things...

09/07/2026

I was buying a $12 toaster at a pawnshop in Cape Girardeau when I saw the silver locket I threw into the Mississippi at 17. Same dent by the hinge, same crooked initials: M.L. + R.T. The clerk said an older man had pawned it that morning and told him, “She never wanted the truth anyway.” By closing time, I had his name from the ticket and my hands on the counter so they would stop shaking.
I had not been inside a pawnshop in years.
My toaster d*ed on a Tuesday, and I refused to pay $49.99 for a new one at Target when I only toast English muffins and the occasional frozen waffle for my grandson. So I stopped at Riverbend Pawn on my way home from the dentist.
The place smelled like metal, old carpet, and somebody’s microwaved chili. There were fishing rods along one wall, guitars behind the counter, and a shelf of mismatched coffee makers that looked like they had all lived hard lives.
I was reaching for a little white toaster when the jewelry case caught the light.
There it was.
A heart-shaped silver locket on a black velvet pad, priced at $86.
I told myself no. I told myself there had to be thousands like it.
Then I saw the dent.
When I was 17, my boyfriend Russell Tate had borrowed my father’s flathead screwdriver to pry that locket open after the clasp stuck. He slipped, and the hinge dented. He had apologized for 2 days and bought me a cherry Coke at the Dairy Queen with his last 63 cents.
Inside, he had scratched our initials with a pocketknife.
M.L. + R.T
Mary Louise and Russell Tate.
I threw that locket into the Mississippi on August 18, 1981, after my mother told me Russell had left town with a girl from Cairo and did not care enough to say goodbye.
I can still hear the sound it made.
Not a splash, really. More like a tiny tick before the river took it.
I asked the clerk if I could see it.
He was a thin man named Evan with a Cardinals cap and ni****ne stains on his fingers. He unlocked the case and placed it in my palm.
The locket was cold. Heavier than I remembered.
I opened it with my thumbnail.
The initials were there.
So was something else.
A tiny folded piece of paper tucked behind the old photo space.
My mouth went dry.
I did not pull it out. Not yet. Some part of me was still the 17-year-old girl who had believed her mother because believing Russell hurt worse.
I asked where it came from.
Evan shrugged. “Guy pawned it this morning. Paid him $40.”
“What guy?”
“Can’t give that out.”
I set the locket back down, though everything in me wanted to close my fist around it and run.
Evan looked at my face and softened a little. “He was older. Maybe late 60s. Gray beard. Walked with a cane.”
Russell would have been 61. Not late 60s. But men who disappear from your life do not age correctly in your head.
I said, “Did he say anything?”
Evan looked toward the back room like he was deciding how much trouble a sentence could make.
“He said, ‘She never wanted the truth anyway.’”
The floor seemed too far away. I put both hands on the glass counter and stared at the locket until the silver blurred.
I bought it. $86 plus tax. Evan wrote the pawn ticket number on the receipt by accident, or maybe on purpose. 1187-C.
At home, I sat at my kitchen table with the locket in front of me. The house was quiet except for the clock above the stove ticking too loud. I had tomato plants outside that needed water, laundry in the dryer, and a life that had gone on for 43 years because I thought Russell chose to leave it.
I unfolded the paper with tweezers from my sewing basket.
It was not a love note.
It was a hospital wristband.
RUSSELL TATE. ST. ANNE’S. 08/19/81.
The day after my mother said he ran away.
I picked up the phone, found Evan’s number on the receipt, and dialed before I could talk myself back into being obedient... Please leave a "YES" comment below and give us a "Like" to get the full story. Full story below

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118 E 17th Street
Goodland, KS
67735

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