Herman got his wedding invitation just fine and arrived about a week before the big day. I was glad of that because I had time to talk him out of wearing blue jeans and work boots. The reasoning I started with was that traditionally grooms wore suits or tuxes. I explained it helped the guests know who the lucky fellow was. That argument fell on deaf ears as did my explanation that jeans and work boots didn’t match a bride’s dress. What worked was when his father gave him money and said,
“Son, go buy a new suit, shirt, tie, and shoes. After all your getting married in a few days!” Thank you new father-in-law.
The wedding went off without a hitch. Except for that little hitch where the minister forgot to have us say,
“With this ring, I thee wed.”
Yep, he just completely skipped the ring part of the ceremony. The best man tried his best to remind the minister but he just carried on. He pronounced us “man and wife” and presented us to the congregation. We walked up the aisle as everyone congratulated us only to turn right back around and have the ring thing accomplished. I think we would have been married anyway but the best man wanted his job completed correctly.
The reception also went off without a hitch. Except for that little hitch when we were doing that tradition of cutting the cake together and then giving each other a piece. I got a little enthusiastic and shoved the cake down my new hubby’s throat. He gagged a bit but stopped short of vomiting or passing out. I guess I should have practiced feeding someone cake.
After we left the reception, Herman took off his new suit of clothes, threw them in a garbage bag and changed into his normal garb of blue jeans and work boots. I hung my wedding dress up but changed into jeans too. We climbed into the cab of our brand new pick-up truck and started our new life together as husband and wife.
We both had our own ideas about the role of a spouse. My husband’s was a bit more defined in his mind than my own. Most were never discussed before we said “I do.” But it didn’t take long for Herman to make clear what he wanted in a wife.
The first thing was he would never get a divorce. He explained it this way,
“I have a gun cabinet full of divorce certificates.”
I replied, “I know how to shoot too.”
So that was settled. No divorce. Murder but not divorce. So far our marriage was going well.
Next he declared his wife would never work outside our home and our children would go to school at home. Okay, I didn’t have an answer for that so I let it slide.
When we married, both Herman and I smoked cigarettes. I smoked Salems and he was a Marlboro Man. So when I ran out of cigarettes I asked my new hubby to please stop and let me buy some Salems.
That’s when I heard the last declaration of what he expected of his new wife. He looked me in the eye and said,
“My wife is not going to smoke.”
Incredulous I asked, “How will you stop me?”
Obviously he had a plan because he answered without hesitation. He said,
“I won’t buy any more Salems for you.”
But what we both hadn’t realized until then was we were pretty well matched. I also looked him in the eye and stated,
“That’s fine. I just switched to Marlboros.”
And from then on my Marlboro Man had to share ’cause I wasn’t quitting till I wanted to.
It’s important to note that we both got smart and quit smoking a couple of years later.
Last evening we experienced another power outage. With the power off we had to remember which light switches to turn off. We didn’t want to be awakened by lights when the electric came back on.
As I sat in the dark I started to think about how we never lost our electricity when we lived in Oregon. It’s a good thing too because turning the light switch in the kitchen on and off was a bit more involved than flipping a switch.
As I mentioned in an earlier post I was a little disappointed with our first house. I know it was only a rental but somehow I expected more. For example the light switch I just mentioned. Actually there was no switch at all. But there were wires! True, there were only two, a black and a white, but still I was used to a switch to turn lights on. In this kitchen I had to connect the wires that stuck out of the wall together if I wanted light. (Trust me I wanted to be able to see.) I will say my husband had made convenient little hooks on the end of the wire so keeping them together was easier.
Then there was the way the washer was plumbed. I wasn’t a plumber but I still knew that the way our washer drained was not exactly going to meet any code (there weren’t any). Not to mention it was just so wrong. Here’s what happened when our washer drained. It ran out the pipe that was sticking out the side of the house. So every time I did laundry it looked like out house was urinating. It was downright embarrassing to be standing outside talking to the neighbors and whoops the house starts peeing. No one ever mentioned it so I guess they had the same fella install their plumbing.
The floors in houses where a logger lived were also a sight to behold. Did I mention that Herman was a logger? The best way to describe the floor in our little place was as if someone with a hundred nails sticking out the bottom of their boots walked on it for years. And you know what? That is exactly what happened! Logger’s boots have nails on the bottom of them for traction in the woods and on logs. More nails means more traction. And the little nicety of taking your shoes off when you come inside was not ever going to happen here. Logger boots went to just under the knee and no man that worked in the woods was going to take his boots off to go in and out.
I also had a shock when the winter weather came. Winter on the Oregon coast came and went quickly. I was used to winter settling in around Thanksgiving and not easing it’s grip until late March. The area we lived in on the coast had about 6 weeks of winter. It was cold, with snow in the higher elevations. Occasionally snow fell where we lived but it mostly rained. The shock was when our water pipe which came from a spring in the mountain above us would completely freeze. No water! It was never frozen the full 6 weeks but it was about half that time. I had to carry water from the little branch beside our house for necessities. To shower we packed up and went to a public facility. I guess the folks who ran it waited all year for people like us.
That little house was always giving me surprises. After surviving the winter, getting a light switch installed, learning to live with a house that had no bathroom manners, I figured I had weathered the worst and could laugh about it. And then came the flying ants!
The flying ants were a real phenomenon not to mention scary and nasty too. These particular ants apparently had a previous lease on the place. I didn’t realize they were sleeping the whole time until they woke up. In the bathroom! Hundreds of hundreds of flying ants greeted me one morning when I opened the bathroom door. They hatched out of the walls and were going stir crazy in that small space. When I pulled the door open they came at me like an army. These ants must have been on steroids or at least multivitamins. They were the biggest flying ants I have ever seen. Their wings resembled bi-planes. I screamed like I was being attacked by an army. My screams got easy-going Herman shook up, until he saw it was only the return of the ants. He almost acted like he missed them. He calmly declared they would only be around for a week or so. Ten days at the most. He explained how they were hatching out, how it happened every year about this time- nothing to get upset about. He told me I would probably want to wait a bit to shower, you know give the little creatures time to get their wings and move out into other areas of the house. Did he think this was really calming me?
Or we could kill as many as we could. This was the route I took. I stomped, swatted, beat, and battered every place that even looked like an ant to me. Then I swept up the remains and waited for it to happen all over again. It was a long week and at the end of it I was sure of one thing. I hate flying ants!
But I have never hated old houses in spite of my first experience. I still notice old fixer-uppers and wonder what they would look like given half a chance.
Earlier this evening my daughter and I went shopping. She was a bit flustered from getting herself and her daughter ready to go. She called it a wardrobe crisis and I knew just what she meant.
I have always enjoyed clothes. I was one of those little girls that wore a dress all the time, no matter what the activity or season. Dressing nice was important to me as soon as I became cognizant of dressing. I think it might be genetic because my daughter at 9 months crawled to her room, took dirty clothes from her hamper and managed to pull them over her head. I figured she was letting me know she didn’t like what she was wearing. My granddaughter is just over 2 and has been seriously interested in clothes for a long time. She also likes to choose what she wears.
My mother also took great care to dress nice. She always made our clothes. That meant my wardrobe was one of a kind. When I did get a dress that mom didn’t make we called it a ’store-bought’ dress. I had very few of these.
When I was 7 years old my mother taught me to sew. By the time I was 11, I was the one making my clothes. In high school I had to wear a uniform. Talk about thwarting the fashion sensibilities. But in many ways the uniforms were a help because I would sew during the week and wear my creation to the Friday night dance. Every week it was a different outfit. I was comfortable with clothes. I knew what I liked. I knew what colors looked best on me and I had a very large wardrobe. Sewing enabled me to become a clothes horse.
Then I got married. Yep, I married a wardrobe wrecker. A wonderful fella who thinks he has fashion sense.
Not long after our wedding I was making a dress to wear to church. I had everything finished but the hem. Standing in front of the mirror I was deciding where to hem it when Herman came in. I was loving this little dress. It felt good on and looked good too. I stood in front of the mirror happy with my newest creation when he said, ” Is that the way it’s supposed to look? ” Now what did that mean? I said, “Yes, it’s really cute isn’t it?” He said, “Well, I guess it will be okay.” What exactly was he talking about? I said, “Don’t you like it?” His answer, “O yeah, it’s a really nice dress.” That was the first time I felt my clothes sense going off kilter.
I left the room, took the dress off and threw it in a box of fabric scraps. I never finished it. From that moment on I haven’t had the same sense of comfort with my clothes.
We discussed the whole issue shortly after. He apologized for not telling me how cute the dress was. But by then the seeds of doubt had started a garden in my mind. I had doubt flowers about my sense of fashion blooming everywhere. My shoes, my hairstyle, my make-up or lack thereof. I was a crippled clothes horse! I still loved clothes but had lost my ability to know what I liked or looked good in. And it took years to even diagnose what crippled me.
The problem was my desire to please my husband, to be a good wife and listen to his advice. In most things it’s been important to listen to him. Like when I don’t get enough salt on the potatoes or the tire needs more air. But when it comes to my clothes I wish I had never asked him the first time, “Honey, how do I look?” He’s just not qualified to answer. It’s like asking a dentist if you need glasses or a mechanic to fix your plumbing. Their expertise is in another field altogether.
When did I discover this? This evening when my daughter who has a great sense of fashion said she tried on 5 different outfits because one by one her husband said they didn’t look good on her.
It only took 35+ years to realize Herman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He wants to help. He doesn’t want to let me down by simply saying, “You know what I have no idea about this kind of thing.” So instead he answers.
What was I thinking?
(Here’s the song “What Was I Thinkin’” by Dierks Bentley)
Whenever we make a change in our lives we can sometimes feel like we are in a new world. Getting married was like that for me. I not only became a wife, I moved all the way across the country to the coast of Oregon, a place I had never seen before. It was a new world for me.
A world without thermostats. A world with wood stoves. I learned quickly how to build a fire in a wood stove. Our stove was not airtight so it had a burn time of about 2 hours. That meant if you left for longer than 2 hours when you returned it would be cold. I always tried to be home in 2 hours.
It was also a world of eating fish and venison. My husband was an avid hunter and fisherman. His reason for hunting and fishing was for the food it provided. I didn’t know what to think when he informed me shortly after my arrival that all we would be eating was either salmon, trout, deer, or elk. How long would I survive was the question because I didn’t eat any of those things! But again I was amazed at how quickly I adapted to my new world. I learned to eat (and eventually love) fish and venison. The will to live trumped the taste buds.
It was a world with out television. No kidding, there was no signal. It was before satellites and the mountains that rimmed the valley were so high no antennae would work. I was glad I enjoyed reading and found the library, which I visited once a week.
It was also a world without radio after 6:00 PM. I found one radio station that came in but promptly at six o’clock it would play the national anthem and go silent. If you weren’t comfortable with yourself or your spouse there weren’t a lot of things to distract you. For entertainment the first year, Herman and I read the entire Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs together. I mean we read each page at the same time through all 24 books. He always had to wait for me because he reads faster, even Tarzan books! Talk about bonding, huh?
It was a world without a lot of sunshine. The months of November through March are when it rains more. I arrived in very early October so I saw more rain and less sun the first six months. I learned to do everything in the rain because it doesn’t quit. I bought a rain coat and read more books.
It was a world with party line telephones. A party line telephone was like having all of your neighbors on your telephone line. I grew up with that in Pennsylvania but by the time I had reached my teens we had a private line. Nowadays every line is private. Being on a party line meant I had to be courteous and careful all at the same time. I learned to pick up the receiver and quickly determine if the line was free to make a call, in other words if I didn’t hear a conversation. I also had to be careful to never leave it off the hook. This would effectively render every telephone on the line useless. The careful part was I listened through my own conversations for that telltale sound of someone picking up. Nosy people stayed on the line to listen to what was talked about. It was a great tool for gossipers. I guess they were disappointed progress brought privacy to the phone system.
It was a world with nice, friendly people. I can honestly say I never met anyone who wasn’t friendly except maybe my neighbor Hannah.
I met Hannah one day when I was baking a pie. My hands were covered in flour and dough when I heard a pounding on the front door. Not a polite knock but an angry pounding. I quickly went to the door and as soon as I turned the knob it was pushed in by a rather stout woman. She stood about 4 and a half feet tall and was about 3 feet wide. She did not introduce herself but with hands on her hips she demanded to know where our telephone was. I didn’t understand but meekly pointed to the corner where our black desk phone sat on a little table. In spite of her girth she moved quick to look closely at the phone. What she saw took all the wind from her sails. She turned to face me and what I saw was a different woman. Her angry countenance was gone. She looked ashamed and contrite. She immediately began to apologize for her behavior. She explained that she needed to use the telephone. Every time she tried to use it, it was busy. The logical conclusion was someone had left their phone off the hook. Since I was the new to the neighborhood she made the leap that I was the guilty party. Since she couldn’t call me and ask, she had to come in person. By the time she actually got to our house she was whopping mad!
I accepted Hannah’s apology. We introduced ourselves and began anew. She was now part of my new world and I wanted all the friends I could get.
It’s amazing to me how much of my first few years of marriage I remember. Maybe that’s because it was unlike any thing I ever imagined it would be. Sometimes when I think back on those first few years I wonder how I lived through them and then I know. Laughter. O yeah, it was the best way to deal with things.
The day my husband and I married we put all of our wedding presents and other worldly possessions in the back of a new pickup truck. The truck was a 4 wheel drive International and it cost $3,500. We drove from Pennsylvania to the coast of Oregon non-stop. I thought we were forgoing a honeymoon because my husband had to get back to work. It wasn’t work we were rushing back to it was fishing and hunting. And hunting and fishing. It was important stuff!
All the way across the country, all 3,000 miles of it I had a picture of the place we were going to live. I don’t know where it came from, perhaps something my husband said or maybe didn’t say. But it was a cute little white country house, one that needed work but had great promise. When we arrived at my husband’s house (soon to be mine) at 2:30 in the morning, he pulled up to the mailbox and checked to see what was in it. The headlights from the truck were illuminating the house that was about to become my home. I didn’t like what I saw. In fact I didn’t believe what I saw. So I said, “Good joke! Now take me to your real house.” But it wasn’t a joke. It was really his house. It was butt ugly and not a thing like I imagined!
It was October and chilly. The house was cold and I immediately looked for the thermostat to turn the heat on. I couldn’t find it so I asked my new husband to please turn the heat on. He said, “No problem.” He turned on his heel and went outside. I thought this was odd but maybe in Oregon thermostats were outside. In no time at all he was back inside but his arms were full of kindling wood. I recognized kindling because we had a fireplace at home. We put a fire in it at Christmas and a few other times a winter but we didn’t heat with it. With his kindling he was building a fire in a small wood stove. I had never seen one. As he built the fire he was explaining to me that if I wanted to stay warm I would need to know how to do this. O great I thought, there is no thermostat.
While the fire was warming the stove that would in turn warm the house, I was checking the place out. And I must say I was not encouraged. I was a country girl accustomed to hard work and I don’t think I was spoiled but I really wondered if I was up to this. A new bride, 3,000 miles from home, and if I wanted to stay warm I had to build a fire in something I had never seen before. Actually, it was good I was 3,000 miles from home.
The house had 3 bedrooms and one bath. It was a small bathroom with one of those metal shower stalls that they no longer make (for good reason). The front bedroom is the one my husband had chosen to sleep in, so that’s were we spent the night or what was left of it. I was not about to get in sheets that I did not know were clean. That meant he had to unpack most of the truck to get to sheets I would use. With our new sheets on the bed I was ready to sleep. I decided to take Scarlet O’Hara’s advice- I’d think about all the rest another day. Even if that day was as soon as a few hours away.
I woke up to a noise in the house. When I opened my eyes I saw a girl about my age (21) standing in the doorway with a box of socks. She was just there. No knock, no hello I’m coming in. She was just there. And when I looked at her she began to explain that she had washed my new husband’s socks but there were a lot of mismatched ones. Fascinating information for me on my first day in my new home with my new husband. I felt like I had jumped into another dimension. The conversation woke up Herman (the guy I married) and he introduced me to his best friend’s wife. And then he realized he needed to go see his buddy right away. So he got dressed and left me alone with the sock lady.
