Pete and Mary

Life can sometimes (many times) seem erratic.  You are going through your days at top speed and all of these random things smack you from various directions and at different points.  Then one day you get enough distance and you turn around and realize that certain moments that didn’t seem to fit anywhere somehow snug themselves in like a jigsaw piece.  It could’ve been a comment, a vision, an exhale or a wrong turn that ended up further down the road to have been the right turn…the only direction worth taking.

Enter Pete and Mary.

It was a chalet, a bird house looking house.  The entrance faced the right side with a big screened in porch where one literally had a bird’s eye vista view of the entire road coming into the lake community.  The driveway was short leading up to a garage underneath the house.  Flanking the driveway were two flower beds with daffodils & tulips in spring, peonies in summer, cosmos following, and mums in the fall.   I was young, my brother in a carriage, it was dark blue with huge wheels.  The road was quiet back then, inhabited by city people who had retired or, like my family, made a break from the brick oven heat of the Brooklyn summer to the ‘mountains’.

You could not pass Pete and Mary’s in the summer without being asked up to the porch for lemonade – no joke-in fact I believe the advertising world based their commercials on them.  Up the stairs you would climb and be greeted by a cold tall glass in an Adirondack chair.  Pete would make the climb to join us, he didn’t come up often but company was company.  Mary would pick up her knitting needles while chatting and he would sit grumpy.  He wore a railroad cap on his head and gray custodian like pants with suspenders.   Talk would last til dinner, many a night.   And summer she kept a rolling….

When I got a bit bigger I would be entrusted with bouquets of flowers to bring to my mother, a parasol because of my fair skin, and once in a while scratch banana bread.  They were the definition of neighborly.

Winter came and I showed an interest in learning to knit.  I worked up the nerve to ask her how much she would charge for a lesson (I was maybe ten years old).  She laughed and said ‘if you get the wool, I will teach you.  One day a week.’  

Wool and needles in hand, I trudged through the snow up the quiet street.  I had never been in their home before and the world that lay before me I could not have imagined.

I was young and somehow sensed the house was perfect in its design.  The top was a peaked loft, the main floor 2 bedrooms and a living room that was ‘just big enough’.  The kitchen was small but efficient as all get out.  Sparkling clean with a small round table covered in a lace cloth (I would later learn the tablecloth, curtains and shower curtain were all hand knitted with cotton string).  The shower curtain was a little Dutch boy and Girl watering flowers under a windmill…did I mention it was HAND KNITTED? 

I guess I was observant even then.  Off the living room was a small door that led to a narrow stair way.  We would descend this wooden case to get to the ‘stove room’ where I would begin knitting.  The stairway made me think of a secret passageway…It went down 6 steps then turned left, went down a few more than left again leading to the stove room.  Cozy could not even begin to describe the room.  It was simple; two chairs and (of all things) a picnic table with benches in the middle.  The stove was in the back corner up on cinder blocks.  Years of selling real estate later in life taught me the set up was indeed the upmost in efficiency.  The stove on the lower level was fed by cut wood kept out of the elements under the screened in porch.  Vents in all the flooring above heated the entire house. 

The door beyond us led to the ‘garage’ which was converted to an enviable work shop.  Tools were respected and cared for and hung as such.  Folks dropped by in the summer with wood ‘scraps’ and Pete worked on making cutting boards, bird houses, and toy building blocks to give as gifts at the holidays.  Mary would knit or bake her gifts.  The ultimate in the concept of consumable, useful presents.  Handmade, time spent, energy gifted.

But the one thing that has stuck with me all these years, the one thing I’ve thought of while baking my own bread, internalizing and savoring the concept of self-sufficiency was this…the closet under that wooden staircase. 

After our knitting lesson, before I put my red boots on, Mary wanted to get a ‘jelly’ out of the closet for me to bring home to my mother.  A marmalade she thought she would enjoy.  She opened the door and pulled on a chain that led to a simple light bulb on the ceiling of the closet.  As the incandescent bulb cast a soft glow on the small room, I gasped.

A perfect little cache lay before me, like a treasure.  Under the skeleton of that ship-like stairway, different size shelves had been meticulously cut and placed by Pete.  Ball jars filled with preserves flashed like jewels as the light hit them.  Jellies, vegetables, pickles, anything and everything you could possibly imagine filled the space.  On the floor atop bricks there were sacks; flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt, Crisco cans stacked.  Never in my life had a seen such a store of supplies. 

I was a child, never supposed to ask questions.  I could not help myself…”Why do you have so much?  Why would you need so much?  Is that really a sack of salt???”  She looked down at me and smiled – a true wisdom keeper smile. “Why dear if Pete and I get snowed in, we will be fine for a very long time, yes?”  I nodded.  The cache.  I never caught a glimpse of that pantry under the square stair case again but it burned itself into my memory.  To this day, 30 some odd years later, I can still smell the lemon oil on the wood shelving.  It tugs at me, at my belly, the core of my being…a longing for the simple.  I too will can food.  I too will learn the old ways.  I too will weather the storms.

In time, Pete and Mary passed on.  Our quiet street that city folk escaped to became noise filled with more neighbors, more traffic, and more motorbikes.  The side lot that separated our property was defiled by a garage with an apartment above it that never made any sense.  So poorly built was this structure that it created a runoff and drainage problem, turning its foundation into a smushy bog of sorts.  Right around the time that building went up, the Bachelor Buttons and Queen Anne’s lace that inhabited that lot since I could first remember became a memory…and so did Pete and Mary. 

The Dutch couple; ready for whatever life threw at them, living, in a house that made sense, living, an intentional life.  Damn but they are missed.   

This learned I from the shadow of a tree that did sway to and fro against a wall.  Our shadow selves, our influences may fall, where we ourselves can never be.     Good Energy from Pete and Mary all those years ago, and now to you~