Last weekend, my best go-visit-on-Sunday pal, the one with a refrigerator and a woodstove in his garage, was out of our zip code.
Thank goodness another neighbor, Mabel, who turns 100 on September 14, agreed to a visit.
We sat next to each other on a loveseat close to the dominant woodstove in her living room. She wore a blouse so red it could’ve been a stop sign.
Since September 14, 1921, Mabel has lived within five miles of where we were sitting.
I asked her what stuck in her mind as the most significant change in the last hundred years. She looked right at me and said, “People never had any money, but there was a lot of love. No one hated anyone. It’s much different today and I don’t know why.
“When I was young, we needed a school on this end of the county, so the men built one. Out of rock. It was first through eighth, and after I finished, I wanted to go to high school in Eureka but it would’ve meant finding a place in town to live and only coming home on weekends. I was lucky to go to school at all being the youngest child and the only girl.”
Twenty miles of travel every day, whether by horse, truck or tractor, middled with seven hours of school, would take it out of a girl. But she learned to read and write and is proud of her flawless penmanship.
“John Cross and Genes Bland, they jumble the letters all together, you can’t even read their signatures,” she said.
“What do you like to read?”
“Science fiction and love stories.”
“What love stories?”
“Gone With the Wind, my, that’s a good story.”
When I asked Mabel how she got to be one hundred years old she said she just worked hard and kept on cookin’. They had a one-acre garden and some cows to see their family and neighbors through winter. She looked out on the porch. “Now I have three tomato plants. In pots! That’s some different.”
Her best childhood friend was Viola, who lived in Democrat Hollow. I always wondered about Democrat Hollow and why there wasn’t a Republican Hollow. Mabel looked at me like marbles were about to fall out my ears.
“The family was named Democrat.”
Oh!
Mabel was the Busch postmaster forever and ran the Busch store for years. She worked long hours and slept in the store a lot because people would knock on the door needing groceries long after she closed.
“One day I thought, ‘I just want to go home.’” So she retired and went home.
There’s more to this story, but my handwriting didn’t seem to record her words all that flawlessly, so recollections got muddled. Not hers, mine.
I got up to leave and take her picture. “I don’t like to wear black. Black makes me sad,” she said.
“Wait! What’s your favorite food of all time?”
“Corn on the cob! Corn on the cob!”
She said her best days were when her children were born, “But let me tell you about the worst day of my life!” which involved the river, a tractor and a cultivator, all under the hottest sun she remembers. “We’d been hoeing corn,” she said, and that’s when my handwriting got like John’s and Genes’s.