“Do you know what today is?” My Granddaddy leaned back in his chair and regarded me through partially closed eyes.
August 18th—what Civil War battle took place on that date? My mind roved frantically through a jumble of generals and statistics field maneuvers that he was always parceling out to me like choice sweets. But my helpless expression must have given me away, for presently he smiled bemusedly and folded his hands.
“It was fifty years ago today that I met your Grandmother.” He opened his eyes wide and looked straight at me. “Fifty years ago. And I still remember it like it was yesterday.”
The little woman who passed through the swinging door from the kitchen at that moment bore but faint resemblance to the dark-haired beauty he had first seen and fallen in love with on a summer afternoon in 1939. The pitiless hand of Alzheimer’s was already beginning to reveal itself in her oft repeated stories and her frequent confusion. But her eyes still lit up with admiration whenever Grandaddy came into view. And when I was over I usually noticed a love note from one of them left on the kitchen table for the other to find.
As Grandma’s dementia increased over the years that followed, her cherished family tales began to drop from her repertoire one by one. But never the story of the day she met her man. It was told to me in unwavering detail until she was altogether unable to tell stories at all. Had I heard it only once, however, I believe I would still see it as clearly played out in my mind as I do at this moment.
I would comprehend the willingness with which her parents saw her off on the train to visit casual acquaintances in Florida, hoping that the sunny climate would erase the last vestiges of a winter’s bout of pneumonia. And I would remember just how it happened, that the Satterwhites would invite a couple of nice college boys over to meet the pretty girl from Atlanta and that Grandma would know at first glance which was the one they had described to her as ‘Claude Jr.’.
“I was sitting on the front porch,” the story went, “and I looked up and saw two young men come in the little gate and amble up the walk. But I really only saw one of them. And I said to myself, ‘Why, that’s Claude Jr.—and that’s the boy I’m going to marry.”
It was just like that. Both of them testified to ‘love at first sight’. And though that’s a rather dubious concept in our ‘enlightened’ age, I have to say that I believe them with all my heart.
Thus ensued a courtship that was to last nearly 60 years. To be sure, as in any relationship, there were hurdles to overcome, not the least of which was my Grandaddy’s intimidation with this elegant young woman who looked like Judy Garland. “He thought I was a ‘city girl’,” Grandma would laugh indulgently. “Why, the roads weren’t even paved in Smyrna then!” But it didn’t take him long to see that the heart in those beautiful brown eyes was only for him. All the love she had saved up in her affectionate little soul was his for the asking.
He officially asked in the fall of 1941. A moment’s bliss—and then the war. Grandma’s eyes always grew misty when she got to that part in the story. Granddaddy was one of the first to go, and one of the last to return.
“Forty-eight months in the South Pacific,” she would murmur, as if to herself. “And I always knew he’d come back.”
For their first Christmas after they were engaged, Granddaddy, who was already gone, had a beautiful cedar hope chest shipped to her. It sat table-high, with a carved apron resting on graceful Queen Anne legs. Opening from the top as it did gave it a rather ominous appearance, however, and Grandma’s fun-loving sisters teased her mercilessly.
“Uh-Oh! Laura Alice’s opening her coffin again!” they would chant whenever she lifted the lid to examine the contents or add some new item.
But she ignored them and went right on hemming sheets and embroidering pillowcases with which to furnish her future linen closet. For four years, riding to and fro on the streetcar to Atlanta where she worked in her daddy’s optometry shop, she stitched dainties for her home and chatted with her best friend whose new husband was also stationed overseas.
And every single night she penned him a letter, always opening with the same wishes and hopes for the day when they could be together and start the life they were so tirelessly dreaming of. Claude saved them all, carefully sorted in sequential order, as she saved his daily letters or ‘v-mails’; they’re stored away in my attic now, awaiting the day when they are pieced back together to form a marvelous chronology of such a perilous and moving time in our nation’s history. But first and foremost those letters are the history of a love. It was a love that displayed a commitment few in our modern world can comprehend.
Looking back on a long and loving marriage, it might be easy to glance over those years of forestallment, such a small portion of the whole. But I really think that the harsh reality of that waiting and perseverance and heart-ache and longing was the story behind the deep appreciation they always seemed to have for one another. Waiting for the one you love to come into your life is hard; waiting when they are already in your heart and yet out of reach is torture. Generations to come will be indebted to that faithful resolve; it’s a heritage that I know I am enjoying the benefits of today.
So Claude went on facing death and danger for the sake of people yet to be born. And Laura Alice went on working and waiting and hoping, putting on dances with the Military Maids and writing letters for disabled servicemen whom she visited regularly in the hospital. And one day in late November she received a telegram—how her heart must have stopped! Claude was in San Francisco, and he was coming home. Not to Florida where his family was, but to Smyrna where his heart was. I can only imagine the half-shy raptures with which Laura Alice greeted her returning gallant at the station.
They were married December 30th, 1945, barely a month after his homecoming. Out came the lustrous satin dress that Laura Alice had been saving all those years and the yards and yards of silk tulle veil. There was a whirlwind of teas and festivities, and the planning of the home reception. And two lives set forth as one, hands firmly clasped against whatever hardships lay ahead.
Their romance was such that when Granddaddy died after 55 years of marriage, something died in Grandma, too. A light was snuffed out. A
nd though it’s sad to see it, I can’t help but thank God for the strength of such a love, and rejoice that they will be reunited again someday after this last long separation.
We had the first fire of the year yesterday. I’ve been checking the weather for weeks now, remembering with a sigh the years that the first earnest cold snap descended in late September. And I’ve been laughing inwardly at the thought of the night last fall when I invited one of my best girl friends over for a fireside dinner and had to open the windows and turn on a fan to keep from smothering us out of the house. But what an aura of soft enchantment it lends to a room, what witchery of light and shadow glancing over familiar objects and loved faces. I once read in a very old decorating book that there were only three principles the author considered of any major importance in the realm of interior design: real flowers in vases, real candlelight at table, and real fires crackling on the hearth. 
I’m a self-professed Austen purist, and I’m a little concerned about the new Pride and Prejudice coming out…looks somewhat contemporized to me. Of course, I’d love to be pleasantly surprised. It’s been far too long since a captivating and lovely and worthy period film hit the theatres and I’m feeling rather starved. (So much so, that at my book club this afternoon when comparisions were being drawn between the new P&P and the ‘debacle’ of the third Anne movie, I welled up at the mere thought of the end of Anne of Avonlea…"The dreams dearest to my heart" and all that.:)) Anyway, if you haven’t seen the 
For an enchanting sojourn in a quaint Scottish village tucked away in the heart of the Angus Glens, allow me to recommend J. M. Barrie’s delightful The Little Minister. 
Isn’t it lovely the way a truly great book lingers with you long after the cover is closed? I dreamed about the end of A Room With a View last night, and this morning I pulled it off the shelf and looked up Mr. Emerson’s heartfelt speech to Lucy in the second to the last chapter. In quiet, isolated perusal it struck me in a different way than it had when I was reading it out loud to Philip in a fevered excitement over what was going to happen (even though we both already knew); the dreadful and yet strangely liberating truth—conveyed through Lucy’s uncertainty and Mr. Emerson’s almost despairing entreaty that she heed the voice of her deepest longings—stood on its own with such a winsome appeal that I’ve been pondering it ever since. 
My little girl of many dreams, the world a book and life a story,
There is something in the air of a breezy, shimmery autumn day—overcast but not dour, cool but not chill—that always brings to my mind images from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Is it the memory of school days, of afternoons on a woolen blanket spread beneath the dogwoods on my neighbor’s hill with a new literature book propped across my knees? There would be a basket supplied with apples and a thermos of hot tea at my side, perhaps my sister close at hand poring over a geography lesson. And I would lean my head against the trunk with a dreamy gaze that swept the rooftops and pines and simply enjoy the feeling evoked by such phrases as “the fairest of all Christian knights” and “a bow-shot from her bower eaves”. Such ‘study’ was never a chore to me, but an endless vista of enchantment.
For with all the joy in the world they lived there together: the most famous knights in Christendom, and the loveliest ladies that ever lived, and the comeliest king that ever held court. For this fair people was in its youth, the happiest under Heaven; their king the greatest on earth; it would be hard now to name so brave a hero in all the land. The Pearl Poet
I picked the last of my vegetable garden today, and that upon the urging of two horrified girlfriends who spotted tomatoes literally rotting on the vine this weekend. The truth is I grew weary this year before my garden did. Usually around the end of July it succumbs to the tropical humidity we are infamous for in the South, and by the time the weather is lovely again in early fall, there’s nothing left to tend but a few tenacious marigolds and pepper plants that have finally come into their own. But this year was a different story, and I have a woman named Ruth Stout to thank.
