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A hot summer day comes to a lovely end as we sit on the porch at dusk looking out at a cove on the Connecticut River and she puts her bare feet on my lap and sips her white wine and a boat goes by and she looks at the Weather app on her phone and says that a thunderstorm is heading our way. I enjoy storms, she does not, so this puts me in the role of male protector, which I don't get to perform often.
I think of my parents, how my mother liked to put her feet on his lap, the affection between them. I knew from when I was tiny that they loved each other. They came of age during the Depression, knew hard times, and she canned vegetables and darned socks and mended pants and bought day-old bread, but they were sweet to each other.
The sky darkens. Flashes of lightning in the distance. We sit and talk about family. This house was built by her maternal great-grandfather in 1911. Her mother grew up in New Jersey and spent summers here. She went to a summer camp for girls across the road and we can hear them at their evening campfire, singing "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty." It's a camp that doesn't allow cellphones or laptops, so it hasn't changed a lot from when her mother was there.
It's sweet, this sense of timelessness. On the Fourth, the village nearby held a parade with antique cars and firetrucks and campers marching and singing "It's a Grand Old Flag" and the Garden Club and Democrats and Republicans marching behind their banners and an armored personnel carrier, it was all very neighborly and cheerful. The fireworks got canceled but the heavens provided an even flashier show.
A remarkable day. We don't celebrate V-E Day or V-J Day but we celebrate the fact that radical thinkers in 1776 committed a capital crime and revolted against their legal ruler, declared George illegal, a violator of their human rights, and in the cemeteries of the original thirteen states you find graves of men who died for the cause.
The woman whose feet are in my lap has an ancestor buried nearby, Ichabod Spencer who fought for the Revolution. I believe that my ancestors were Loyalists but we don't talk about it.
It's raining now and the lightning is closer. She suggests moving into the house but I want to enjoy this moment. If we go in the house, we'll see things that need to be done and get busy and I want to sit together and hold her feet, rub the soles, talk quietly.
Her father grew up in Minneapolis, near the University, and her mother went west during World War II to study aeronautical engineering. She was quite smart at math and physics and the shortage of men, due to the draft, created openings for women to move into new fields.
Her brother was at the U and she was scouting around for a room for him to rent and knocked on the door of a rooming house and there stood a handsome Swede whose mother owned the rooming house. Romance ensued. Both of them were serious pianists and lovers of classical music.
From such happy coincidences most of us are descended. Life is a miracle.
My father was a farmboy on a struggling farm and he met a city girl who had a sense of humor and a big heart and was very kind to his disabled father.
Times were hard in 1931 and she gave him hope. The woman whose feet I hold is the younger sister of my younger sister's classmate. She was a freelance violinist in New York when I met her sister and her name came up in conversation and her phone number was given to me and we had lunch at Dock's on 90th and Broadway and it lasted for three hours. A taciturn man met a talkative woman.
And now the Weather app is talking about golf-ball hail and high winds and we feel a gust of wind and a brilliant explosion of lightning and we head into the house.
I'm still on vacation from the news and so the domestic pleasures have become the center of my life, overshadowing the affairs of state and the future of democracy.
We go indoors and get out of the storm. G od bless America.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.