Since Valentine’s Day is upon us, I thought I would share a little story I wrote. It’s pure fiction, based on nobody in particular. I wish you all to live in a house filled with love.
Where Love Lives
Sometimes you walk into a place and you just know love lives here. It’s an intangible thing, a sense of how things are, but nothing you can put your finger on. So it was inside the souvenir shop where I found my temporarily missing wife.
The bed and breakfast was located in a sleepy little town along an old state highway, left behind decades ago when the big interstate was built. We wanted someplace quiet to spend a week away from work and the New York City summer crowds, and we found it an hour away from home in of all places, New Jersey. There was a blues bar in the town center where we had danced the night before, along with a number of antique shops, post office, town hall, and a deli. Church bells rang every day at noon and six in the evening, old oak and maple trees lined the street and gave deep shade to the front of the inn. The Sleeping Swan boasted deep, comfortable furniture in the bedrooms and common room, and rocking chairs on the wrap around porch, as well as simple, delicious, home cooked meals. I had fallen asleep after a bountiful brunch and on awakening found that my wife left a note on the bedside table. “Gone shopping with Gayle” the note said. It took me a minute to remember who Gayle was, since we just met her and Raymond at breakfast that morning. Silence greeted me as I descended the stairs and passed through the parlor to the front door. A slight rhythmic creak alerted me to Raymond’s position in the last rocker at the other end of the porch. Nodding in recognition he continued his slow rocking as I perched on the edge of the chair one away from his.
“Our ladies are out spending our hard earned money,” he said with a wink, wiggling gray eyebrows over twinkling blue eyes. “I don’t know about Regina, but Gayle loves to hunt for treasures in these little towns we visit. She always seems to find the out of the way shops with handmade things that somehow we didn’t realize we need.” I didn’t answer, I was wondering how to politely get out of this conversation with the older man to search for Regina when he said, “If you want to go find your wife, they went up the street that way,” and pointed to the right toward the blues bar.
“What makes you think I want to go find her?” I asked.
“Son, I know the look of a man who feels lost when he wakes up and finds no wife where he expected to see one,” he answered and then put his head back and pulled his straw hat over his eyes.
I wondered at senior’s perceptiveness as I passed the bar and peeked into an antique shop which displayed tiffany style lamps and vases in its large picture window. How had he known what I was feeling, when I barely knew myself? It didn’t take long to glance in the four remaining shops on the street, and I stood indecisively in front of the post office before deciding to explore the rest of the town and headed down a side street. About halfway down the block I began to hear the tinkling of wind chimes along with a clicking sound. Following my ears I found a yard filled with wind chimes hanging from wrought iron shepherd’s hooks and a collection of colorful wooden whirligigs mounted on wooden
posts. A sign under the roadside mailbox read “Moving Air, handmade gifts”. Following the flagstone path, I was drawn to the craftsman style house and its red door. As I ducked through into the crowded space I took in a breath of the tantalizing scent of chocolate chip cookies, and saw Regina smiling at the clerk and paying for her purchase. As I stood there watching her, she turned her head and noticed me.
“Greg!” she exclaimed, “What are you doing here?” and forgetting her bag, rushed over to hug me. “Isn’t this place fabulous?” she asked, and proceeded to gush about all the wonderful things they had, and tell me how they were all hand made by the proprietors, a husband and wife named George and May. “Isn’t it great? George makes all the whirligigs and May makes the chimes, and the cookies. Here, have one, they’re on the house if you want to try one. I bought 2 dozen to take home with us tomorrow,” and she held one up to my lips. As I ate the cookie she introduced me to George and May who stood talking quietly to Gayle. There was something about the place, and the couple who owned it, a calmness, a sense of peace and the feeling that no matter what else happened in the world, everything would be all right. George and May stood side by side, without touching, yet seemed connected to each other in some cosmic way that most people aren’t. It was an oasis in a desert of negativity which the outside world had become. This was a house where love lived. Now we live in the love house. Ten years ago George and May sold the house to us when they decided to retire and move closer to their children. Raymond and Gayle passed away within days of each other a year ago right after their last visit to the Sleeping Swan where we met them every year since that first until we moved here to start a family. Our children knew them as Grandpa Ray and Grammy Gayle, and we will miss them. After all, if Gayle hadn’t befriended Regina that day and found the “Moving Air” shop, we wouldn’t have found the house where love lives.
