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When I had the
chance I should have paid more attention to Mrs. Cole, but for some
reason I just kept holding back from reaching out to know her. I
have explored the reasoning many times in my mind as I view her from
hindsight. For twenty years I passed her by like an overall
pattern of decorative wall covering, observing the outward details of
sameness, but resisting the human closeness of wholehearted
meaning in our contact, to know the differences that made her a
person.
Our common
meeting ground lay just beyond the century worn door of the former
Vicar's cottage on Wool Street every Tuesday morning at eight a.m.
sharp. The building had been converted some thirty odd years before
by a concerned Episcopalian minister, Brother Tom, asking the
ladies of the parish to come to the aid of the neighborhood
by volunteering to sell donated goods at a reasonable price under
the battered hand sewn banner of: The Trinity Thrift Shop, single
in its purpose to attract and welcome meandering and interested
bargain hunters to its inside array of fanciful and the utilitarian.
Mrs. Cole
happened to be one of the many of us who faithfully patronized the
Trinity, but she always seemed poles apart in the things that
she chose. She did not languish over any of the finer items, but
instead insisted upon a peculiar assortment of odds and ends, the
guess as to their meaning and future use was only obvious to her world.
Without fail
it was my impression each and every time I saw her that here was a
well worn, hard working mountain woman who, by the small gold cross
hugging the folds of her neck, believed in God and treasured her
family who gave her the wisdom of her gleanings in the first fifteen
years of her life. What ever she had learned at the knee she held
fast to her belief system, taking it as being a literal truism with no
room in her consciousness for translation or change.
Dependably
every week, she always wore the same unadorned short-sleeved
cotton dress, faded to a dried winter leaf brown, fastened with
small dark plastic buttons pushed through hand mended buttonholes
holding the thin material together. Her outfit defied the interest in
the notion of conventional fashion, and epitomized the Ozark First
Baptist look of humbleness.
Curiously I
can retain all of the lines and the details of her physical
appearance down to her salt and honey hair Pulled back from her wrinkled
work worn face, the wisps of clinging blonde still apparent from
her shortly lived womanly years of youth, the sum of her looked for
all the worth like a purchased bundle of synthetic hair you could
select in the five and dime store during the forties and the
fifties, packaged like a rolled sausage in various colors
for a quarter to
plump up the lack of a luxuriant God given growth.
She had a
habit of constantly pushing her plain gold rimmed glasses back against
her small round watery blue eyes, wiping them frequently with a small
tissue, and when she talked, a rather prominent pink-brown
wart on her chin moved with ever word, it seemed to have taken on a
character of its own by its sheer size, texture, color and in trimmings
that had sprouted five long and coarse hairs.
When the swell
of patrons converged all at once on the counter to pay for their
found treasures, she stood as if transfixed at the bits and pieces of
female clucking and chattering and the welcoming exchange of news of
families and common friends, shuffling first one foot and then the other
in her plain worn, dark brown, simulated leather loafers that
shod her feet and protected her meek step, making a slight
clomping noise with their irregular bargain priced size. It was however
the personal aroma of her aging body that left an impression of
a combination of mildew and personal musk that defied soap and
water, perfume or the scented Gold Bond powder.
She was the
only woman I knew outside of my grandmother's mother who wore thick
light brown cotton stockings rolled in a knot below the knee, and
added to her archaic leg wear by insisting on wearing a second pair of
coverings in the form of white folded tennis socks that ended
with the generous ribbing touching the tops of her loafers.
Many times as
I recount the scenes I see her gently trying to include a word in her
polite thick drawled Ozark accent, reaching out in her quiet demeanor
to attract women's talk, coming from a place where a sixth grade
education was the highest aspiration and the least expected from
the women folk.
I pictured her
as being more comfortable had the group accompanied her to the
more familiar surroundings of her own front porch as she continued her
unceasing obligatory labors of hanging clothes or asking them to
join in her kitchen as she helped to can fruit butters and vegetables
raised in her garden, or even to spend the afternoon baking cookies
that spread out the length of her small rectangle table powdered
with flour dust and breathing the distinctive trace of lard from an
old can with a rusted rim.
I would have
liked to have heard stories of her childhood, watched the expression
change as she spoke of where and how she went to school, the
games she played, her mother and her father, her grand mother and
grandfather and their celebrations and dinners, her first love and her
husband and children, but I didn't, I held back.
I didn't spend
any more than a twenty-four hour day of total hours in the twenty
years I considered her, and now I reflect on her and am left to wonder
about this woman who vividly came as a visitor to my mind this
morning, bright, alive and moving through memory.
Maybe it was
because I had asked the women of the Trinity in passing, "Have you seen
anything of that woman who used to come in here wearing that
old faded brown dress all the time and talked with an Ozark accent"?
"Oh!" one
replied with a knowing air, "That was Mrs. Cole. No! She's passed away
you know. Yes, she died last year, last winter, Poor thing!"
I stood
silent. "No I didn't know". I automatically answered. But there was
something that bothered me deeply inside my heart I just noticed after
six months that her appearance had been missed with its regularity.
I was left to
think about her not being there anymore and of the other people
who I noticed over time that had come and gone. Shoppers of a long
duration who had spent their youth and their aging coming and going from
this place.
It was at one
time enough to give a general description like the tracing of a
lineage you wanted to know about; the woman with grey hair who wears
chop sticks in her bun, the Mexican woman with the three
children, the old woman who always wears lime green, but now
it is not. I will
not allow the others to slip away without asking their names, or
their children's names, or where they live because I volunteered
last week to stand in back of the counter.
In hind sight,
I ask myself, If I could distinguish the look of want and caring,
and still hold back in giving Mrs. Cole the best of my attentions,
how then will I leave my impression of what I am, to who ever it is
that cares to know before it is too late to ask?
So I am
writing a story of a person I really don't know, can only guess at, and
have hope for the future in recording more to a life than what it
is I held back knowing
If there is a
lesson to be learned, Mrs. Cole was my unwitting teacher, her
lesson was clear and simple as her demeanor. Don't Hold Back.
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