It was a shining Saturday morning in 1953, and my parents,
my little brother, and I arrived at my mother’s parent’s farm in Peebles, Ohio
from our home in Columbus, Ohio, as we did nearly every Saturday morning. I
jumped out of our car and went in search of my beloved seventeen-year-old Uncle
Dean, my mother’s youngest sibling. I thought it odd that he hadn’t run out to
greet us as soon as we pulled up to the yard of the farmhouse, but was at that
moment still unaware of any cause for alarm. I combed the rooms of the
farmhouse, the grounds, the barn, and other farm buildings, but strangely, he
was nowhere to be found. My heart flattened like a leaking balloon. “He went to
see a friend, but he’ll be back in a little while,” my grandmother told me. Well, I’ll just wait for him then, I
said to myself as I plopped down on the steps to the front porch, my heart
prepared to leap into somersaults of gladness as soon as I saw the plume of
dust kicked up by his car on the long gravel road leading to the farm. “He went
to get Nellie,” I heard my grandmother say to my mother through the open window
just over my left shoulder. Who’s Nellie,
and why is he bringing her here? I wondered. “He sure likes that girl. He
told me they want to get married,” my grandmother added. Until that moment, I
didn’t know what a broken heart was, much less how a broken heart feels, how it
makes a shining day turn dark, and all the cluster of days ahead unbearable. I
didn’t know that those Mondays through Fridays when we were apart that he
wasn’t as true to me as I was to him. I didn’t know he had another life in which
I wasn’t its center. I didn’t like this whole idea one little bit, because he
belonged to me, exclusively; everyone knew he was mine, and had been since the
day I was born. I was prepared to do battle with this Nellie-person, to prove
to her so definitively that he belonged to me that she would run away and never
come back. I deserted my sentry post on the front steps and dragged my heavy
heart into the house and threw myself on the couch, face down. I waited—and
waited, my spirit a fusion of tears and fight.
“Tick-tock; tick-tock,” the clock on the mantle sounded,
each sequence conducting a sad song in my mind. But presently, I raised my
reluctant face to seventeen year old Nellie Compton as she walked through the
door, and something primal shifted inside me. Like lead turning into gold, my
tears, my anger transformed to another element I didn’t know existed, a part of
me full of enigma, and yes, new promise. Barefoot, scraped knees, torn shorts,
and tangled mop of flaxen hair, I was just a little kid, a tomboy, a precocious
package of burning energy without an inkling that life would be any different
than it had been until then. I didn’t know I was in search of a model for my
own budding femininity. She walked through that door, and in an instant, I was
aware of soft smooth skin, lustrous hair, fetching clothes, and lipstick. She
was a farm-girl, but nevertheless, pulled together in a way no girl from her
remote existence in Adams County, Ohio, USA ought to be. Long legs up to her
armpits, a halo of ash-blond hair, her blouse tied stylishly in a knot beneath
her breasts, she gave new meaning to a pair of rolled-up-at-the cuffs blue
jeans. All at once I loved her, and not because of her special place in my
Uncle Dean’s heart, but because of the special place she had nestled into in
mine.At odds with her beautiful physicality, she was wholly unaware of the stunning figure she cut. Her innocence was easy to recognize in her spectacular but bashful blue eyes, in a soul sweet but cowering, uncomfortable, wary of people. She seemed ever on the hunt for a way out of a terrifying place, to be in conflict with a demon inside herself. With the passing years, like a shade pulling down on a window, we watched sadly as the gemstone sparkle of her eyes faded more and more behind her lowered eyelids and her glorious head tipped away from us on its axis. I think that because she sensed I was so star-struck by her, and similar to her in some ways, she allowed me to get close to her as few others ever did. The first time I saw Princess Diana of Great Britain, she reminded me of a young Nellie Compton—the same fashion sense, the glossy blond tresses, the uncertain blue eyes, the lowered frightened chin.
During a
marriage of nearly four decades, Nellie and Dean raised their daughter Deana, worked
hard on their own farm, and Nellie fought the demon inside herself valiantly.
But it won eventually. Like her mother, her mother’s mother, several of her mother’s
siblings, and one of her own siblings, as well as a number of other members of
her mother’s family reaching back to earlier generations, Nellie became a
victim of Alzheimer’s Disease. We couldn’t help but wonder if some mean
tentacle of it had been doing its dirty work on her since her teen years,
therefore accounting for the quirk in her personality. We lost Nellie to the
illness 46 years after that day she became a standard for me of lovely
femininity. I will remember her that way, always. –Linda Lee Greene, Columbus,
OH 4/22/2018
Award-winning
artist and author, blogger, editor, and interior designer Linda Lee Greene is
on social media at the following:
Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/author/lindaleegreene
Email: lindaleegreene.author.artist@gmail.com
Twitter: @LLGreeneAuthor
Also look for her at LinkedIn and Google+
