For Agnes Longley on her Birthday July 31

Wind Song by Carl Sandburg

Long ago I learned how to sleep,

In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,

In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,

In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, ‘Who, who are you?’

I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.

There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.

Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,

Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:

Who, who are you?

Who can ever forget

listening to the wind go by

counting its money

and throwing it away?

I was a lucky child with grandmothers who lived in homes that overlooked the sea. Two on the East Coast, one on the west. My favorite was Agnes Longley, my stepmother’s mother, whose cottage, Wind song, faced the Atlantic, 3,000 miles from Spain. Her birthday was July 31st, which gave us another reason to celebrate in the summer.

The cottage, a former inn, had five bedrooms, each with a bed and a sink in it and floors that were painted grey. A shingled colonial with a white trim, there was a wraparound porch that was ringed with hydrangeas and privet. The dining room was oversized and each wall had floor to ceiling shelves that were painted blue. At one end of the room the shelves were filled with books and jigsaw puzzles. At the back of the room the shelves were filled with dishes and glass ware. There was a large picture window that looked out over the water with two chairs and a card table. Named “Sea Moor” when she bought it, my grandmother renamed the house for a Carl Sandburg poem.

You could set your watch and calendar by my grandparent’s schedule. They arrived every year from Philadelphia on May 15th on the noon boat and left October 15th on the 12:30 ferry. In those days the local paper ran announcements about the summer visitors. “The Rev and Mrs. Harry S. Longley have arrived in ‘Sconset for the Season.” My grandmother put out a door mat that read “Go Away”by the front door.

By the time I met her, my grandmother was weary and bored by her life as the rector’s wife. My grandfather was beloved by his congregations, but was exacting and predictable in many other ways. There was no spontaneity. Dinner had to be ready at 6:00 pm, otherwise he would start pacing. He played golf every day at the same time taking the family car with him, so that even in retirement, my grandmother’s schedule revolved around his. He sat and read U.S. News and World Report from cover to cover the day that it arrived in the mail.

My stepmother was continually exasperated by her mother. She found her to be provincial and small minded and was irritated by her devotion to her bridge group and the Junior League. I thought she was fun. She loved to work crosswords and jigsaw puzzles. We gave the card table by the window a workout playing endless games of Scrabble, Monopoly and her favorite, Clue. We hauled out her heavy Singer Sewing Machine and created a dress for me from fabric that was printed with Toulouse Lautrec posters. She followed the Red Sox with a score card, keeping track of all the players and their statistics as well as the league standings.

Mostly, when I think of Agnes, I see her in the kitchen off of the dining room. She would sit at the red linoleum covered table, that matched the floor, in the center of the room smoking and working on her crossword. When she came back from shopping at the grocer, she liked to check the receipt and she would put all the groceries on the kitchen table and check them off the cash register tape one by one. More often than not, she found discrepancies, either she hadn’t received a sale price and was overcharged or she had gotten ice cream for free. Either way, she would report to the store manager the following week and settle up with him.

Agnes whiled away the evening hours with Wintergreen Necco Mints, Bugles Corn Snacks, a container of whipped cream cheese with chives, and a glass of Old Grandad bourbon on ice, getting supper ready. My favorite was her eggplant which she salted and left out on paper towel before frying it up in a big cast iron frying pan that came with the house, like all the other furnishings. My grandmother kept a detailed inventory of all the linens, bath towels, cutlery and table service items. Her handwritten lists written in cursive with her fountain pen, were fastened to the book shelves and cabinets with gold thumbtacks.

She reminded me that someone will always know someone that I know where ever I go, so I should always be on my best behavior. Which has proved to be true over and over again. She also liked to say, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. This was mostly directed at my uncle who would come home with 40 bluefish.

She was a no nonsense Democrat. My grandfather was a staunch Republican. My grandmother used to say they cancelled out each other’s votes on election day. The summer that Nixon resigned she went out and bought a television set – the first in the neighborhood – and gleefully invited everyone in to watch Nixon’s resignation speech on TV.

Agnes carried a lightship basket with a seagull on the top, that a house guest had given her, instead of a purse. She was well known from Philadelphia to Hong Kong for saying, “No, dear, we’re from ‘Sconset,” when fellow travelers asked her if she was from Nantucket. If people told her they had a house on neighboring Martha’s Vineyard she would say, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She claimed she could tell who was going to get off of the boat when it docked at Oaks Bluff. She kept a hat by the door to pop on, so she could say she was on her way out, when anyone she didn’t want to visit with stopped by.

I know that all of this makes her sound sort of snobby, but to me she was just entertaining herself in a mischievous sort of way. Seeing what she could get away with and making those who agreed with her smile along the way

In the 90s the house was torn down and “replica” was built. It made me cry to see what had been my grandmother’s pride and joy reduced to rubble. Times change and simple somehow lost its appeal. How grateful I am that she did not have to see it.

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