Edwina
[If you are new to First Light, Saturday Stories are a break from the usual Scripture-based daily devotional. Every Saturday I publish a brief story from life. Sometimes there is a “moral to the story,” and other times it's just a story. I hope you enjoy today’s Saturday Story.]
Try as I might, I am unable to visualize by memory anything except that Mason jar with tiny brown droplets of dirty water streaming slowly down its sides, and pooling on the long edges of my bony fingers. If you were to ask me whether their house had brick or wood siding, carpet or wood floors, or how much and what kind of furniture was placed in it I would have nothing to add to what I am saying here. Even Edwina’s mother is a blank. Was she a tall or short woman? What color was her hair? None of this made enough of an impression on me to register in my memory.
Why was I in their home? Were we making a neighborly visit, or did I just happen by while out walking and was invited in for a drink of water? I don’t remember. The only bit of information, and the one thing that was forever seared into my memory, were those Mason jars they used for drinking glasses and how Edwina’s mother handed one to me and the revulsion I felt while staring at those brownish droplets of condensation moving down, ever so slowly onto my hand which was wrapped around that jar, and how I wanted to quickly set it down and run home but I was frozen in fearful indecision, unwilling to drink but also not wanting to offend the woman who gave that glass of water to me as a gesture of kindness.
It might be that my lifelong dedication to refusing to drink from someone else’s glass or allowing others to drink from mine stemmed from the trauma of that moment in Edwina’s family’s kitchen.
Edwina lived up the road from our family home on 104th East Ave. Where we lived it was hard to call anyone a neighbor. No one lived close by. Our property was surrounded by wheat fields to the north and west, unused acreage to the east, and a cattle ranch across the road to the south. Further east was a creek. They call it “O’Brian Canal” nowadays. Edwina’s family was the closest thing to a neighbor we had and their home was up the road a section line to the west. My friends, George, Jeff, and Ken all lived out in the country too, but not within walking distance. Tim lived in town with his mom, a single mother, an oddity back then. So, no one even close to my age was nearby. My options for friends to play with were my siblings or Edwina. Even though she lived close, we kept our distance. Edwina was different. As a young boy, I had no category for that, and no way to understand and deal with it. Even today, l don’t want to put a label on her condition. Labels change so often that I’m not sure what today’s acceptable nomenclature is. So, I’ll leave that alone.
Edwina was older than us, although I can’t say how old she was. She was a large girl, or so it seemed to me. It was intimidating in a way. But her imposing stature wasn’t the reason we built the wall between us. It was her mental state. She wasn’t normal.
I remember the day Edwina walked down the road to our house. We saw her through the living room window. We peeked through the crack in the drawn curtains, hoping she wouldn’t see us, although she had to know we were home. We were almost always home. When she got to our drive, the gate was closed and held fast by a chain that looped the round, wooden corner post. It wasn’t locked. Edwina could have unhitched the chain and swung the gate open, but she couldn’t comprehend that.
Feeling locked out and with no one coming to her aid, Edwina folded her arms and laid them on the top of our gate, rested her forehead on her forearms, and wept. Her tears ran down like those droplets of dirty water on that Mason jar. We looked on, frozen somewhere between choosing compassion toward or rejection of that which appeared unclean and unwelcome. Indecision led to inaction and inaction was the choice.
Maybe I should have chosen differently, but I was just a boy. When I was a child I chose as a child, now I have put away childish things.
