THE THREAD | The Edna Next Door
{a weekly letter from Andrew}
~ ~ ~
She was not patient. She was not kind. She was not the neighbor who welcomed us warmly when we bought the house next door to her on Harrison Street. She was not interested in change. She insisted on everything remaining precisely how it has always been, and how it has always been means 1942, the year she turned 16 and moved into her house. Now a feeble four feet in her 90s, Edna was not the least bit interested when I asked if I could install a gate across our shared driveway so that we could keep our small children contained in the backyard, safe from the street. She scrunched her small wrinkly face and said, “It’s never been a problem before. Why don’t you just watch your kids? That’s not a gate’s job, that’s your job!” She was not gracious. She was not merciful, especially not to children whose whiffle balls accidentally flew over her fence yet again. Edna was not interested in my idea to remove two feet of the fence across the back edge of the property line so that our kids could easily pass between our yard and their friends’ yard behind us. She insisted that the fence stay exactly as it was—no gaps, gates, no holes. The fence is there, she said, because one day back in the 80s a man just walked right through the yard, and the police must have been looking for him because, you know, he looked suspicious. This was back before there was a fence, and it hasn’t been a problem ever since the fence went up, and the fence has now been there for a long time, and why would we want to go and change things? Why do you insist on changing everything? She was not easy to love. To someone who takes the Gospel teaching to “Love thy neighbor” as a most basic and practical way of life, she posed a challenge that was largely metaphysical in nature: How do you love someone you just don’t like much? How do you serve someone when you actually prefer that they just, you know, change? She did not change. Though she did have her own way of adapting to the seasons and keeping an orderly schedule to mitigate the unexpected. Every spring she hand-washed and line-dried her linens, window dressings, and undergarments so they would last another hundred years beyond her. (Stoic as she was, at least once a year Edna’s underwear flew over the backyard like a pirate flag.) One day every May, a slim man in his 60s would arrive in his red pick-up, unload his mower, and spend a full eight-hour day mowing the lawn and trimming the edges until it looked like a golfing green. She would watch vigilantly from the porch all day, letting him know when he missed a spot. In late June, another handyman would arrive in his white service van to get up on a ladder and install a singular air conditioner unit in the window of her dining room where she would sleep during the summer months until late August when the same service man would return, take down the AC unit, and put the bars back on the window. On the holy feast of Halloween, she would call and say, When are those boys going to come knock on my door anyway? She did not want to leave the house, the porch, or the backyard garden where her irises and roses bloomed every year for over half a century. Up until the day she could no longer drive, Edna would only leave the house on Sunday mornings, backing her 1985 Buick down the driveway and then slowly cruising the car to St. James Catholic Church two blocks away. She refused to go to the hospital. Even when she was living full-time on an oxygen tank, she insisted on a back-up plan that would prevent her from needing a trip to the hospital. She hired her handyman to anchor a gas-powered generator into the concrete in the backyard. He covered the generator with a fake doghouse to protect it from theft. In case of a power outage, the generator would be turned on to keep the oxygen tank running. It would provide enough power to keep her alive, keep her out of the hospital, keep her out of a hospital bed and the hospital gowns with the open flaps in the back that would diminish the dignity of any woman born in 1927 at the outset of the Great Depression; hospital gowns that would diminish the dignity of a woman who lived her childhood through a great war, moved into this house in 1942, and never left; hospital gowns that would diminish the dignity of a woman whose teenage fiancé was killed in war, a heartbroken woman who made the choice then to never marry, a woman who asked her sister to move in and live with her in his place; hospital gowns that would diminish the dignity of a woman who did not like the changes she saw happening around her, who put bars on her doors and windows and watched and witnessed and lived through so many changes —of what, a neighborhood, a country, a body?—all of which now seemed so unpleasant to her eyes as far as she could see, and now includes this young man, born yesterday in 1982, who has never nearly drowned in the deep end of heartache and now insists that everything change. No. She was not to be diminished. And here I am, attempting to talk about all that she lacked in the ways of love, as if I know a damn thing about it. Here I am, facing instead all the markings of love that I lack. I am not patient. I am not kind. I clearly excel at keeping record of wrongs. Etc. She was not canonized after she died. She was not memorialized at the Vatican nor eulogized by a bishop. On a chilly March morning in the nave of St. James Catholic Church, a somewhat tone-deaf choir sang hymns, and a somewhat disheveled parishioner read scripture, and a somewhat unremarkable priest told a few dozen people in the pews what he knew about Edna, how every single Sunday morning she would arrive long before Sunday Mass began and gather with a few other women in the center aisle of the church. They would whisper softly to one another for twenty or thirty minutes. The priest, relatively new to the parish, said that he finally asked Edna what they were whispering about. She told him they whispered prayer requests back and forth—not for themselves, but for other parishioners who were sick or homeless or hungry or going through great trials, and they would make quick plans for how to care for them in the coming days. Every Sunday for twenty minutes, he said, Edna whispered a small web of love into being, a small web to hold others, hidden and unremarkable to those of us who can’t hear or see, a web that becomes part the greater web of love created by the small whispers of who we are, a web of love that is not diminished, not at all diminished by all we are not, or have not yet become.
~ ~ ~
~ ~ ~
THIS WEEK:
What I'm listening to: Dust-to-Digital's Goodbye, Babylon, Justin Townes Earl's The Saint of Lost Causes, and my friend S. Fairbanks' new release I Been Around
What got me thinking: This NYT article about race, representation, and the American folk music canon
What I'm re-reading: John Gardner's Grendel
What I still haven't found that I'm looking for: the huge jar of Reese's Pieces at Costco
~ ~ ~
Wishing you webs of love big and small,
Andrew
P.S. I send this email every Wednesday morning. If you know anyone who might enjoy reading this weekly letter, they can sign up (or you can do it for them) by entering their emails here. On the other hand, if you want to stop receiving it, you can unsubscribe below.