Life in a Nutshell

Harriet, Mary, Virginia and the Enchanted Castle

During the Summer of 1993, I left the safety and comfort of my Oregon college experience and took my very sheltered person on an Amtrak train from Portland Oregon to Cleveland Ohio.

There were no sleeping cabins for me...just a seat (only slightly wider than you find on an airplane).

It's a good thing I was only nineteen because any older and my body would have been irreparably damaged by curling myself up in a ball and trying to sleep in a chair for three days as I crossed the United States at a hundred miles an hour.

The only thing I took with me other than one duffle bag, was an extremely large teddy bear given to me by my then-boyfriend...(Greg, for those of you in the know) Blecch. The teddy bear and the relationship died an untimely death a mere six months later.

My nana (The very same one from "Century of Women" at the front of this anthology) had invited me to spend the whole summer in her upper-middle-class turn of the century home. She was a widow of ten years by this point and was very, very active artistically and socially. She was planning my continuing education this summer by exposing me to the graces of a big city.

It was definitely a summer of wonders. I was a country ranch girl, I'd never been exposed to culture or genteel society. My mother always tried to ingrain manners, proper place settings, napkin etiquette, and a few other things; including how to iron a man's collared shirt.

However, that's difficult when my dad only wore work shirts with snaps, and polyester western wear that would melt if met with an iron. This is the man who barely used a fork at mealtimes, left a ring of crumbs around his plate after eating, and would offer a satisfying belch as a form of flattery for my mother's good cooking.

My manners and cultural diversity were sorely lacking in retrospect and my grandmother had plans, big plans.

Summer 1993
Shaker Heights, Cleveland.

One of the first things I remember about this summer was my nana's social circle. She was constantly surrounded by approximately two or three other ladies in their mid-seventies, who were in various stages of their second childhood.

Her friends drank cocktails and bourbon at lunch, had lawn parties, took art and pottery lessons, attended book clubs and senior art outings. They took French, Spanish, German, and Japanese as second or third languages, and they gossiped more about boys than I did!

These ladies would coo at me, and put their hands on my hair, my waist, and shoulders. They were never inappropriate, but just a little too eagerly involved. In hindsight, I'm sure my grandmother shared more than she should have with these surrogate godmothers. They felt entitled to my life history...and at the time I was happy to give it.

They would look closely at me and tut if my mascara was smudged or if I wasn't as happy as I should have been... (I was pining for a boy at the time) and obviously wasn't holding it together as well as I should have.

After two weeks, they took it upon themselves to act as my activity directors and find things to keep me busy. My grandmother led the pack.

My grandmother's very best friend was a woman named Mary Dagby. Mary was a very happy divorcée, she had been a professor at some point, and was comfortably retired with a grown son and no grandchildren.

Mary was a late-blooming artist, she wasn't professional, but she loved pastels and did many still life arrangements with gusto. She had a green thumb and liked to wear canvas wrap-around skirts with big pockets. She also took it upon herself to find me a job for the summer, which I was thrilled about.

The Enchanted Castle
Mary acted as a personal secretary for a much older woman (near ninety) who had lost her husband many years before. This woman, Harriet Lincoln, lived alone in her mansion...(no joke). The neighborhood my grandmother lived in was pretty high-falutin'.