Fall's Tease

It was fall's tease. A preview of what was to come. A month away from winter and it was snowing, but once the snowflakes touched the ground, they disappeared. With all the lights out in my farmhouse, I stood at my kitchen window and starred at the floodlight on my neighbor's back porch. One of nature's incredible spectacles was playing in 3D in the space between Margaret's house and mine, but the beauty was lost on me. My confused and cluttered mind had more important things to think about.

I found the farmhouse by luck. I knocked on a stranger's door to ask if she knew of a rental close by. As if the lady who introduced herself as Margarget were expecting me and with much enthusiasm she told me my timing was excellent. The farmhouse next door that her grandfather had built in the 1800's had just that weekend been vacated. It was that easy. One day I'm living in Indianapolis and the next Evansville.

He had told me that if I married this man from Evansville, he would come to the church, stand in the balcony, and yell, "NO!  STOP! YOU ARE MARRYING THE WRONG MAN!" Really? He would actually do that? He would come to my wedding and make a marriage-interruptus scene? I have to admit that that did sound pretty cool--two men in love with me at the same time and one professing his love in such an outrageous way--but then again, maybe not. He had been my first love and he had had nine years to ask for my hand in marriage, but every time I asked, "When are we going to get married," he would answer, "When I get married, I'll be the one doing the asking." So, I don't know how you feel about that, but my thinking was, "If you snooze, you lose."  So one day I met this handsome, slow-talking, southern man from Evansville and gave Love Number One no notice. In an instant, or so it seemed, I was engaged to be married and moving to Evansville to be close to my betrothed.

BACK TO THE SNOW, THE FARMHOUSE, THE CONFUSED AND CLUTTERED MIND

I couldn't sleep. Too much to think about. What if I was making a mistake? What if Love Number One was right about Love Number Two? I didn't know him long enough to commit to forever and ever. Why did I say yes so soon? Maybe I should lengthen the engagement? Spend some time apart? What was the hurry anyway? Long relationships are the best because you get to know everything EVERYTHING about them before you make a commitment to spend the rest of your life with them.

Tap, Tap, Tap. What was that? Was it snowing harder and the flakes were tap, tap, tapping against my bedroom window?

Tap! Tap! Tap!  Nah! Probably not snow.

"You are making a big mistake. Can I come in?" he pleaded as he stood shivering in the cold. During the nine years that we dated he had tapped on my bedroom windows on many occasions (remember what I said about about dating someone a long time so you get to know everything about them?). Even though the last thing I expected to see was Number One's face peering at me through my bedroom window, I wasn't surprised either.

This was my last chance, he said. After making the effort on my behalf to come all the way to southern Indiana in the middle of the night and in a snowstorm, was it not obvious who really loved me. Don't nine years of history mean anything?

Yep? Nine years of history means everything. Have a safe trip home.

An Enchanted Time

She was born in an upstairs bedroom of a two-story farmhouse in Evansville, Indiana, on Thursday morning, June 20, 1895. Her mother was well attended with female members of her family, and the delivery was without complications. As was the custom of the time, her father was relegated to another part of the house. They named the first of their two daughters Margaret, and she would live through five wars, the Great Depression, the moon landing, two presidential assassinations (McKinley and Kennedy), the invention of the information super highway (Internet), and the worldwide computer crash that never occurred on the first day of January, 2000. She was one of a very small percentage of people who could say they lived in three centuries.

In the early morning hours of June 21, 1895, as the young farmer's wife sat in the dim light from a oil lamp and rocked her hours-old baby back to sleep, she could not have been any happier than she was at that very moment. She had been blessed with a large, supportive family who lived minutes away, a God-fearing, hardworking, family-first husband, and now a beautiful, healthy daughter. Margaret's mother could not, in her most fanciful dreams, know what the next one hundred and five years would bring to the world and her precious daughter.

1975

She opened the door of her small bungalow, and when she saw me standing on her porch, she said, "Well, what do I owe this pleasure, fraulein?" Even with a curve to her back, she towered over me. She was wearing her Sunday best, along with a pearl neckless and matching earrings. Her white hair was pulled back into a French roll and kept in line by an army of bobby pins. Before I could explain the reason for my visit, she pulled me inside, and within minutes I was sitting at Margaret's kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee, anticipating that German coffee cake (kuchan) still baking in the oven, and listening to stories from an enchanted time way back when.

So much had happened in her short eighty years, she told me. "The turn of the century was a wonderful time to grow up." She didn't know where to begin. "Just start at the beginning," I said. I had no job, no social engagements, no pressing appointments. In this unsettling, complicated life of mine, I needed a distraction from the battles being fought in my head. I found it in a time machine in Margaret's kitchen. "Tell me everything," I said, "Take me back to 1895."

Her parents, extended family and friends were from Germany and had settled in Evansville all within a short horse and buggy ride from each other. Major events such as building a house or barn were shared by the men in the community while the women fixed the meals and brought them to the site. Hard work brought rewards and benefits, she told me. No one complained about the how hard life was back then because at the end of the day there was a sense of accomplishment and purpose as well as a spirit of comradery and fellowship that came from helping each other. "Did you know that the house you are renting from me next door was built that way?" she said as she got up from the table, pulled back the kitchen curtains, and pointed to an old farmhouse a stone's throw away. Sitting under an attached lean-to sat my little yellow VW bug. "That was my dear, dear grandparents' home," she said. "I loved them so much." 

So what brought me, at age thirty, to a small German community in the southwest corner of Indiana in the first place? Instead of enjoying a Saturday night out with someone my own age, why was I sitting in an eighty-year-old lady's kitchen looking out a window at her grandparents' home that was now my home?

LOVE

Margaret found her true love a little later than most women at that time. But, she would never settle for less than what she wanted in a lifetime mate. She was patient, willing to wait and in her mid-twenties, Freddie came calling. "Oh, how I loved that man," she said more than once. Even though he was quite a bit shorter than her, she wasn't going let a detail so insignificant taint all of the other qualities that made him so special. Just like her father, her new husband was a God-fearing, hardworking man who always put family first. "It was the best time to be young and in love."

It became an every morning ritual. The combined aroma from coffee brewing and kuchan baking never failed to greet me the moment I opened the door to my neighbor's home. She always met me with a hug and kiss, a place at a fully-dressed table with linen tablecloth, napkins and silver flatware for two. Then she would start the time machine, and we would travel back to the beginning of the twentieth century. Her stories of a golden age forever lost in history captured my imagination, fed my romantic notion of life and love, and convinced me that I had been born fifty years too late. Over time, we became close. I cherished those mornings in the company of an articulate, well-dressed, lady full of proper manners, charm and grace who claimed to have been born at just the perfect time in all of history. "It was a simpler time back then," she said. "We didn't have all of the modern distractions that took us away from what is important in life." Sometimes, when we were leaving one event to attend another (Freddie's new Model T, their wedding, the birth of her son, etc.,)  I could  sense her slip down into a state of melancholy. After a while, and much to my surprise, I also fell into the sadness with her. As if it were my own life we were reminiscing about, I mourned the loss of the good ole days along with her. I longed for the simple life, connection to a large, extended family, sense of community, being a part of something bigger and more important than just myself, the love.

THE LOVE

Oh, yes. The love. That's why I was living next door in the farmhouse that her grandfather and a community of family and friends had built.  It was love, or the hope, promise, and illusion of love, that persuaded me (without one iota of thought) to quit my job in Indy, pack my Beetle Bug with a few belongings and move to, well, his town...so we could live a block away from each other, get to know one another better, get marri...uh...go our separate ways.

1995

Margaret made the news. She was a centenarian. One hundred years old. It had been a very long time since the two of us sat at her kitchen table and travelled back in time. The coffee and kuchan smells were exactly as I had remembered them. She still wore her Sunday best and the pearls were there, too, but the stories were gone. It was her memory. Not so good anymore. Her melancholy was lost to a bit of senility and my melancholy was gone as well. I was fifty now, divorced with one son, and my youthful fantasies, thoughts and expectations about life and love had been reshaped by having lived in the real world. Twenty years had passed since I had come to Evansville looking for love. I didn't find it, but I did discover a sweet little old lady with a time machine living right next door.

2000

My precious friend passed away on August 8, 2000. She was one hundred and five.

Margaret's grandparents' home that I rented in 1975

I Don't Belong Here

Even though Robert and Louise's lust and fate deposited me into this time slot on earth (1945-?), I don't feel that I belong here. I was born fifty years too late. Oh, I adapted because isn't that what we misplaced misfits do? Sorry. I didn't mean to include you as a misfit. Everyone knows how well you fit into this texting, tweeting, hash tagging, facebooking, googling, twerking, bff-ing, lol-ing, :)-ing, fake reality tv, high speed world. But enough about you; let's talk about me, shall we?

I have never fully adapted to this thoroughly modern world; I faked it. I'm sixty-eight years old now and I'm still faking it (don't tell Tom). I'm tired of pretending. I live here but I don't fit in. I speak the language, but this technologically advanced, faster than the speed of light, self-indulgent, materialistic lifestyle is foreign to me. Had I been born in 1895, I would have missed all of this, this, this...what do you even call what is happening here?

2013: DINNER AT A CROWDED SITTING-ROOM-ONLY RESTAURANT

"I don't belong here," I said while listening to a conversation that had absolutely nothing to do with me.  The conversation had been pleasant enough: fine wines, five-star restaurants, Broadway plays, art galleries, mutual funds, European vacations, luxury cars, designer bags, favorite reality tv shows. Then without warning the conversation took an abrupt right turn and life, as the baby boomers at the table knew it, came crashing to the floor. Well, it hadn't actually crashed yet but it was imminent--#THESKYISFALLING. With the vivid imagery of what's to come, everyone at the table could now marinate in all the gory, graphic details of the upcoming apocalyptic horrors until a few sensitive stomachs threatened to upchuck that delicious filet mignon smothered in tantalizing Danish garlic cream reduction sauce. Have you heard what's for dessert?  "Better than sex" chocolate, chocolate divine cake. Decaf anyone?

"I don't belong here," I said again but no one heard me. Too many people talking at the same time with the volume turned up. Too many opinions of the same flavor--was it vanilla?--yet some had peanuts sprinkled on top while others had pecans. So even though they were the same flavor, they were just different enough to make the anxiety palatable to almost everyone.

"I don't belong here." Well, to be fair to those around me, I was mumbling to myself so possibly no one heard me.  As I age the brain filters that used to protect me from inappropriate behavior and comments are starting to lose their effectiveness. They're almost seven decades old now so it's possible they may be a little clogged. Making a proclamation that "I don't belong here" could be one of those comments that should be blocked. Not wanting to embarrass myself, I decided to sit silently, tug on a long nose hair, and mumble to myself, "I don't belong here. I don't belong here. I don't belong here."

After excusing myself for a trip to the lady's room, I returned to Tom's and my table for two. My husband sat speechless as he watched me take my chair from our table and squeeze myself between two boisterous baby boomers at the next table over. As I sat listening to Doom, Gloom, Crash, and Burn, my husband leaned over and tapped me on the shoulder, "Sweetie," he said. "You don't belong here." 

"Oh, no. That's not true. I do belong here. Have you heard what we're having for dessert?"