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Now the mizzus was a sort of mail order bride. I came out to the rainforests here in the 70’s, bought my 7 acres and my mule just before the interest rates went wild and discovered how few single ladies there were in the woods of the South End.
So I resorted to what our pioneer ancestors turned to … no, not THAT … I wrote back to the Midwest for a wife. I had a lady friend in Minnysota who was just fixing to graduate with her masters degree in librarying. Librarying, I thought to myself, is even better’n school ma’arm. She could teach some of the artists on the South End here how to read and write and then we could sit around the porch and discuss Nietzsche and Tolstoy, the events of the day.
Late spring of l981 I commenced to writing heart wrenching, bodice ripping, pulse pounding love letters. I told my darling all about our little island, how it was a tropical paradise where our beautiful cottage nestled in the arms of million year old cedar trees and coconut palms and you could see the Olympic Mountains every night at sunset glowing like a fireplace and that old sun had nothing on the lovelight in my heart for her …
Course she didn’t have a chance…. Who could resist my literary charms? And I’m sure she carried a picture of my irresistible self in a locket in her bosom, pining – PINING, ladies and gentlemen – for that day a letter would arrive from her Prince Charming, old lumber Jack himself, king of Camano, practically Paul Bunyan with a book of poems under his ax arm.
Well, I was surprised TOO she didn’t rush out to my waiting muscle bound arms. So I wrote some more. I wrote a dictionary worth. Then I wrote an encyclopedia Britannica. Spring turned to summer, summer turned to fall, fall became winter, my dreams turned to mush. I run outa words. ME! With nothing left to say. I was about to give up and become a Zen hermit priest.
But one day I got a letter saying she was coming OUT. … For a day or two, then going to Alaska to see her cousin. Alaska? Why on god’s green earth would she go to a godforsaken hellhole like that when she could have the whole South End paradise?
Course she was gonna see the cottage wasn’t a cottage – it was a shack. Leaky roof, crooked floors, a ladder to the upstairs. Alaska was gonna look REAL good. And Prince Charming? I was in serious trouble now.
But luck was on my side. The day she flew in a storm took out a dozen trees to the South End and power was out when we pulled in the drive. So I lit up the oil lamps and popped the champagne and boiled the crabs on the woodstove and I won’t tell you the details but let your romantic imagination run wild and you might have some small notion of why the mizzus is still the mizzus and why we both still celebrate the day she came out here and not our wedding anniversary and why the South End will always be a tropical paradise to at least a couple of us old lovebirds.
