Our 30th Year

by Beth Alexander Walsh

     We have made it. 30 years. Our wedding day seemed a lifetime ago and yet feels like yesterday. We had a spectacular party on a gorgeous September Saturday. A happy day followed by a Hawaiian honeymoon and the beginning of the rest of our lives.

     I married well. My husband was (and is) a hard worker. He literally built our house on nights and weekends while working his full-time job. We started with one toilet and a moving blanket for a door in the downstairs and I carried the dirty dishes upstairs to the bathtub as the kitchen sink had yet to be installed. Our dinners together, when I was not working nights, were eaten in the living room on a hand me down coffee table from my parents. I tried my best to help with painting and staining, but the heavy lifting was always his. It was just the two of us those first four years, as we worked on the house and tried to tame our unruly yard. There were ski weekends away, nights out with friends and family and a few infamous summer parties.

     His construction schedule for our house ramped up when I became pregnant with our first child.We needed actual railings on the stairs instead of the two by fours that kept us from falling from the second floor. I had also told him that I refused to feed a baby at the coffee table and that he needed to finish our dining space. There were bedrooms to build and a bathroom to finish. Babies needed a tub to bathe.  Those nine months passed very quickly, but he got it done. I remember us telling our carpet guy how we needed to install the carpet before the baby came. He dubiously looked at my very large waistline telling us he would do his best three weeks before my due date. The house became presentable (enough) when we took our daughter home from the hospital.

     The next five years were a flurry of activity. Our family grew from two to five. Our tenth anniversary came and went, barely acknowledged as the pressing needs of our children came first. Now outnumbered we became tactical conspirators joining forces to raise our little cherubs. It was good to have an ally.

    By our 20^th anniversary there was much to celebrate. Our life was full and rich. There had been trips to Disney, the Grand Canyon and Vegas. (Yes, we took our kids to Vegas!) There were summers on the beach and on the lake. There were cookouts and fire pits and marshmallows and annual camping trips to Vermont with friends and family. There were plays and concerts and sporting events. There were Easter egg hunts, Trick or Treating, visits from Santa and the tooth fairy, and the anticipation of the next Harry Potter book. There was much pride and joy and laughter. Our children have made life more vibrant and us better people.

     Our marriage has not always been easy because life is not easy. We have endured the agony of sick and dying parents. We have been devastated by the loss of too many friends gone too soon. There have been miscommunications and misunderstandings. Harsh words were sometimes followed with days of silence. I have had moments when I thought I was too good for this man only to feel I was unworthy of his love a month later. We are human and flawed but are wholeheartedly connected in love and faith in each other.  I have learned in these 30 years that I don’t have to like the same TV shows, books, music or movies. It is okay for our hobbies and social groups to be different. Keeping balance of who we are individually makes us stronger as a couple.

     Our 30^th anniversary was spent on a ten-day trip to California. The last time we were away alone together for that length of time was our honeymoon.  We are slightly different people from then. We are a little slower, grayer and sporting a few more pounds. I am more appreciative of this vacation than I was of our honeymoon. It was hard earned and every moment was savored by us both. He still opens doors for me and grabs my hand when we cross the street. It is now again just the two of us anticipating what our future has in store and I am thankful we are together to continue that journey.

  

The Bookstore

by Gail Balentine

Two Years Ago

Jake left that morning on a business trip. I smiled at the airport but we both knew I hated it when he was gone. You’d think a writer would enjoy the solitude but I didn’t, especially since I had begun questioning whether I was meant to be a writer at all.

I’d heard there was going to be a new bookstore downtown and decided to see if it had opened yet so I could pick up something to read while Jake was away. I loved the name of the shop: Real Life Books   –where stories and life blend.

A bell tinkled as I entered and the young woman behind the counter smiled. The store was cozy, with bookshelves and tables artfully arranged, as well as several chairs gathered near a fireplace whose mantel was lined with pictures of literary characters – I could see Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter, Hercule Poirot and Superman from where I stood. I felt at ease and grinned, knowing they would get much business from me. 

When I’d started writing with the serious goal of publishing, I had developed a ritual for my visits to a book store. Fiction is arranged by the author’s last name, so I go over to the G’s and look for my name, knowing it’s not yet there. Silly habit, but I do it anyway. I dutifully scanned the end of the F’s and came to the beginning of the G’s – and there I was, Sarah Garnett. What? Someone else published with my name? With heart pounding, I removed the book from the shelf. The title of the book was And What Now? Fortunately, there was a chair right there at the end of the aisle. I needed to sit down.

When I opened the book and started reading, I could feel the blood drain from my face. It was a story, yes, but not fiction. It was written in the first person and began with my birth, my parents, and older brother. I flipped through the next chapters to see schools I had attended, friends’ names, and Jake. It continued through college, my struggles with writing, and stopped when I entered the bookstore that morning. The written words filled almost the first one-third of the book. The rest of the chapters were blank. 

I dropped the book, as if it were on fire. My head spun and thinking was not possible. I’m not sure how long I sat there before the woman from the register came over to where I was sitting, picked up the book, and asked if I was all right. All right? Is insane all right?

No, I told her. I was not. My words tripped over each other as I hurriedly explained about the book and its contents. She glanced at the book and back at me. And then she asked me if I had fallen, or hit my head.

“Look at that book. What do you see?”

Very calmly, she said, “The Gift by Julie Garwood.”

I stood, grabbed the book, and left the shop, without stopping to pay. Once at home, I locked the doors, ignored my phone, and tried for hours to figure out what was happening. Every time I looked over at the book sitting on the table, I shrunk deeper into the chair. I didn’t eat, sat up all night in the dark, and got angry. I waited until 9:45 AM. Real Life Books opened at 10 AM and I was determined to find out what was happening to me.

When I got there, an older woman opened the door and ushered me in. She seemed to be expecting me. She led me to the chairs near the fireplace and said, “I assume you have some questions.”

Everything about her was calm – her voice, the way she sat in the chair, erect yet comfortable-looking. There was not a hair out of place. Her clothes were soft – a lavender silk blouse, matching wool skirt. A strand of pearls. Her hair was white but I could picture it jet-black and long. I shook myself back to my problem.

“Do you know about the book I found on the shelf yesterday?”

“Of course,” she smiled, “I put it there for you.”

“You what? But the other woman …”

“She couldn’t see what you saw.” She said this as casually as if talking about the weather.

I decided to try a different approach. “We’ve never met, how did you know I would come to the store?”

“It was never a question of if, Mrs. Garnett, only when.”

A customer needed help. She rang in the sale and returned, with a tray holding tea cups, milk, sugar, and several small muffins. It had started to rain and when she turned on the light near us, a soft rosy glow enveloped where we sat.

I confess, I wasn’t thinking at this point. I had expected a strenuous denial on her part and was not prepared for her actual response. Anger left me, taking my energy with it.

“Where did you get the book?” I asked. My hands shook as I brought the teacup to my lips.

“They come in the mail, in plain brown wrapping paper and, before you ask, I have no idea who sends them.” She stared at me over her teacup, dark brown eyes that noticed every detail.

“They?”

“There have been 10 so far. One a year.”

“And the others, were they also unfinished biographies?” She nodded. “Were they all writers?”

She listed eight authors whose first published works had made the New York Times Bestseller List over the past eight years. The other two names I did not recognize.

“Wait a minute. Are you saying that you gave each of these people a book like this,” I waved mine, “and that made them best-selling authors?”

She put down her teacup, leaned forward, and said, “The books didn’t turn them into great writers. There was no advice given, no effort to teach. They already had the skills they needed, as do you. But - seeing their lives in print, and all the blank pages ahead, helped them believe in themselves and start on the road to fill the rest of ‘their book’ with those things that mattered to them. For eight of them, that was to complete their first novel. For two of them, it was changing careers.”

I stood to leave, speechless, until I got to the front door. Then I said, “What do I owe you for the book?”

“A signed copy of your first novel.” She pointed to an antique curio cabinet in the corner. There were eight familiar books behind glass, with room for more.

The sun came out as I stepped outside.

Yesterday

Jake received a promotion and we moved out of state very shortly after my visit to Real Life Books. I never spoke about the bookstore or what happened there to anyone, even Jake. I did, however, keep on writing. We were back in town to visit friends and to allow me to bring my about-to-be-published novel to the shop.

When I got there, it was nice to see that everything seemed the same, except for scattered balloons and a Grand Opening sign. I waited in line and when it was my turn, I asked the man at the register about the signs. He said it was indeed their opening. He went on to say that they had expected to open two years ago but there had been a series of delays in converting the space from a curio shop on one side and a cobbler’s shop on the other to a bookstore. Finally, they had purchased the furniture and shelves from the two places, knocked down the wall between, refinished the floors and wall, and I was looking at the result. He laughed and said that you could still smell boot polish on rainy days.

I had prepared myself that anything could happen when I walked into the shop, so I did not get upset at his answer. Long ago, I had decided it didn’t matter where the inspiration for me to write came from, just that it was there. I told him I had returned to town to bring in a copy of my first book. He was very pleased and said he’d been wondering about where to display local authors’ work.

Taking another quick look around, I did notice one changed detail and called to him as I neared the door.

“Perhaps you could remove the cups and saucers from the curio cabinet over there and put copies of books written by someone from this area on the shelves.”

He looked over at the cabinet, smiled at me, and said, “What a great idea!” 

The bell overhead tinkled as I quietly closed the door.

*****

All the Girls Were Getting Married

by Terri McFadden

My paternal grandparents didn’t have a happy alliance. They didn’t fight, to my knowledge, but were at best indifferent to each other. They lived in a five-room house and never even sat down in the same room at the same time. He had his two rooms, she had hers, she fed him in the kitchen and had her own meal on a TV tray in the living room. As a little child, I didn’t think much about this; as children do I accepted what I saw without question.

I was close to my grandmother – Grandma Sweeney we all called her – her name was Jessie Huston Sweeney.  She was born on a farm in western Pennsylvania in 1887, one of two girls. She and her sister married two brothers. Jessie married Samuel Hartman Sweeney - always called Hart - and Nora married his brother Ed.

Sometime in the mid 1960s, when I was 15 or 16 I became curious about the cold relationship between my grandparents. I asked my grandmother: “Why did you marry him?” She was a straightforward, no nonsense kind of woman and she answered simply, “All the girls were getting married and he asked.” 

A world away from her girlhood was mine. I had possibilities, choices – she was constricted by the times in a way that I couldn’t possibly understand. In some ways her childhood didn’t seem terribly different from my own, but in other ways it was vastly different. She had attended a small, one-room school with 25 or 30 pupils of all ages. I went to an elementary school in a building built just five years before I started first grade, crammed with baby boomers, 35 or more to a room.

The farm where Jessie grew up was just ten miles from the small town of Ligonier where I spent my childhood. Her home was a log structure of four rooms built in the early 19^th century, with no running water, lit by kerosene lamps. Mine was a brand-new brick split level house with five bedrooms, a play room, TV room and a shuffle board court in the basement. But both of us had extended family nearby; grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles were all available and get-togethers were common. Church was important in both our young lives, which we attended with strict Presbyterian regularity.

I expected, along with my siblings and friends, to go to college and prepare for a career. As a female, my choices were somewhat limited – girls could be teachers, secretaries, stewardesses or nurses, and of course, mothers – but I had choices.

I don’t remember when I learned that Grandma had once been a schoolteacher, but I was proud of that fact. It was confusing to me that she had earned her teaching certificate not in four years, but in a four-month course. Jessie finished 8^th grade at the one room school in the village of Fairfield and then attended a “summer course” at Indiana Pennsylvania Normal School. It cost $4.50. She began teaching at a one-room school not too far from her family farm, though in horse and buggy days, it was still too far for her to live at home. Instead she boarded with the family of one of her students.

When she began to share stories about her teaching days I came to realize just how different her experiences were from my own. It seemed strange to me that all ages were in taught in the same room and that she was barely a year older than her oldest pupil. Our school was well heated and comfortable, while she remembered a wood-stove which, on very cold days, the children would take turns standing close to in order to keep from freezing. Older boys in my day might get an afternoon job at the Tastee Freeze or the local grocery store; we girls earned our 50 cents an hour by babysitting. The boys that Grandma taught, “checked their traps” before school and sometimes came to class smelling of skunk. All of the boys and girls had to help on their family farms.

She described what she taught her students. The students learned to read and to write and to “cypher”. They had frequent spelling bees and mental math contests. They memorized poetry and geography. I never commented on her poor grammar, though I wondered how she could have been a teacher and not understood when to use don’t or doesn’t – as in “He don’t need to go to the store.”

When she married my grandfather in 1903 she gave up the school, having taught just one year. She had to quit her job – married women weren’t allowed to teach. She may not have even given it a thought; she always seemed to me to be a person who accepted what was.  Also, as a farmer’s wife, she had a job at the farm. Likely the young couple couldn’t have managed without her assistance at home.

Their life wasn’t easy. My grandfather wasn’t a particularly good farmer and she had to do much to make ends meet. They had pretty much given up the hope that there would be children, when after nearly eight years of marriage, she gave birth to a boy they called Braden.  Braden lived just six years. He contracted diphtheria, a killer we don’t think about today, thanks to inoculations. Her mother, who lived nearby came to help nurse him. “He seemed much better”, my grandmother told me more than 50 years after his death. She had gone outside to the garden and her mother was with the little boy. “My mother said he sat up and started clawing at his throat.” He died a few minutes later. I cried for that little uncle I’d never known. It was the first time I understood that children died. 

In 1923, she and my grandfather bought a piece of property in Ligonier. My father had been born in 1920 and a few years after that that Grandma suffered a severe sunstroke. She could no longer handle the heavy work that farm life entailed so they moved into town. The agricultural depression of that decade kept the farm in the family; there were no buyers for the rolling 80 acres. Although my family is grateful that the land has stayed in the family for more than 200 years, not selling it made life very difficult for my grandparents.

While my grandfather sold farm machinery at the local International Harvester, there wasn’t enough income to support the family of four. They had several ways to bring in extra money. They kept chickens and sold fresh eggs. On Saturdays Granddad would slaughter the Sunday-dinner chickens. Grandma would clean and pluck them and then she would take the fresh birds to her customers, traveling on the train from Ligoner to Latrobe to Derry late on Saturday afternoon.  She came to hate those chickens. In later years any sort of bird that might come to the table she called “fowell”, somehow elongating the word so that it sounded truly disgusting. My mother always heated a slice or two of ham for Grandma on Thanksgiving, because she wouldn’t eat turkey.

A large garden provided vegetables for the table and jars of beans and tomatoes were joined each August by delicious apple butter and peach preserves. The bounty must not have always held however. I recall hearing stories of meals that consisted of nothing but cabbage soup.

Today the Sweeney home might be called a poor one, but they didn’t seem to see it that way. There were so many people worse off and my grandmother was a generous woman. Their home became one of those places that the thousands of men on the move during the Great Depression knew about through word of mouth. You could get a good meal at the Sweeney’s house on Fairfield Street. In addition to keeping boarders and selling eggs and chickens, Grandma made and sold ladies undergarments, tended her large garden and generally kept going. She never really stopped working in all her 92 years. On her death-bed she remarked that the peaches were ripe and if someone would fetch a peck and a paring knife she’d have something to do to keep her occupied.

When I was in my teens she would call on me to come and help her with the heavy housework. After the chores in the “forenoon”, mopping floors, cleaning woodwork and so on, she would cook us a substantial “dinner” – she never used the word lunch.  We’d eat fried pork chops or meatloaf, mashed potatoes, homemade bread and apple sauce and she would talk about the “boys” she knew who went off to World War II or memories of her childhood, where “they had less, but were more content than now days”. After I got my drivers license she called on me often to take her on errands. Only once did I balk and I must have let her know I didn’t want to spend my Saturday driving her around. It was the only time in my life that I saw her angry. 

One of those Saturdays she taught me how to bake bread. She was a small woman, and smaller in her old age with a severe stoop.  At 5’2” I topped her by a head. That morning she made up ten pounds of flour into what would become a dozen delicious loaves. She used an old refrigerator crisper drawer to mix the dough. Initially she asked me to mix it, and at first, I did okay. But as the dough got stiffer, I could barely make a dent in it. She took over, kneading and kneading that mass of dough until it was smooth, the severe arthritis in her knobby hands didn’t hold her back at all.

Years later, after her death, my father sent me her “receipts”, her recipes.  In my hand writing I found my notes of that day of bread making. I remembered asking her for the recipe and she was surprised as she didn’t bother to use one for bread. She told me what she was adding and I wrote it down. Evidently, I left it behind that day, but she had saved it, tucking inside her favorite cookbook. A message for me from the past.

I remember that while we let the bread rise we talked – me asking questions about her life and Grandma answering through stories of a very different time. The three risings and baking took all day. At the end of that Saturday I drove her all over town where we delivered the still warm, home-made bread to friends and family – to their delight and to my unforgettable memories.

*The photographs are of Jessie Huston Sweeney and her sister Nora about 1890 and as adults with their mother, Sarah Huston.

 

 

New England Autumn

Cold snap.

Heat wave.

Apple crisp?

Or sweet sorbet?

Who knows when

& who knows whether

The weather men'll

Explain this away?

 

 

--Liz Ciampa, 2017. Photo courtesy Liz Ciampa.