A woman I know told me a story from her childhood, when she
would occasionally get shipped off to spend a few days with an aunt who lived
out in the country up near Nisswa in Crow Wing County, Minnesota.
This would have been in the 1950s. Nisswa was a resort
community, known for blue lakes, tall pines and vacationing city people. I
imagine her aunt would have lived in a part of the township summer visitors
rarely saw—back in the second growth remainder of the old North Woods, where
the local people had carved out small, sand-bottomed farms.
Some of those places still didn’t have electricity or
running water, and a woman’s life would have been hardscrabble and isolated.
She would have spent her spring planting and her summer gardening, picking
berries, canning and preserving food, tending livestock, cutting wood, and
doing housework. Her autumn would have been spent harvesting and readying the
place for winter, which she would have spent feeding the fire, sewing, and
enduring the almost-oppressive silence that would have descended when the
songbirds departed in October and lasted until they returned in April.
I imagine the aunt to have been shaped by the seasons and
her routines; to have been hard-working, quiet, and suspicious of strangers the
way rural people almost always are. Her work and her life would have
introverted her, and I imagine her relatives sent the girl out to break the
tedium and provide a little bright young company, if only for a few days.
The girl would have been seven or eight at the time, and she
almost certainly would have barraged her aunt with those questions, both vast
and insignificant, that children ask. If not questions then the kind of gossip,
intimations and confidences little girls overhear as they listen to the women
around them.
The girl’s company would have winched the woman up out of
her introspection whether the woman wanted to be winched up or not. I picture
the girl following her aunt down rows of vegetables, both of them hoeing, the
girl talking a mile a minute, the aunt smiling to herself, recognizing local
people and long-recurring themes.
And the girl continuing to talk while the two of them
collect eggs from the henhouse, still talking as they shovel live ashes from
the kitchen stove firebox into the metal coal scuttle, still talking as they
sweep and scrub the linoleum floor.
Often, after supper, a neighbor lady, Mrs. Jones, would come
over to sit outside and watch evening descend and night come on. Not just the
sunset. The entire end of the day—daylight to twilight to nightfall in the
North Woods in summer. She remembers the two women sitting quietly, awash in
the evening.
She remembers, too, that Mrs. Jones had lost two or three
fingertips, some farm accident no doubt, and that the woman painted little squares
of nail polish onto the ends of her fingers where her nails had been.
I have written the conclusion to this piece over and over
again, but some images are perfect in-and-of themselves. So I’m
just going to leave the three of them sitting there, the two women watching
night come on and Infinity revealing itself overhead, the girl stealing
glimpses of Mrs. Jones’ manicure.
