They Heard It Through the Grapevine, or This Old Merryweather

But a change in the fortunes of moribund little Merryweaher came about ten or twenty years ago, from the too-predictable phenomenon which afflicts locales with any natural beauty, temperate weather, and a charming downtown district of old Progressive-era brick-and-mortar structures.  That is to say, over a nice Pinot picked up on her last winery-tour weekend, some chatterbox with plenty of money from undetermined sources ended up rhapsodizing to her friends about getting away from the rat-race through blissful self-exile to “the country.” 

En masse her nip-and-tuck friends (in the main generic specimens from the swirl-swish-and-swallow crowd) in turn convince their mates (who are too busy funding winery-tour weekends to think straight) that a migration to pastures new (or at least to property taxes lower) would be a Good Idea.

Thus came the gentrifying invasion of the chatterbox and her fellow semi-menopausal friends.  In their fresh-off-the-lot jacked-up SUVs, these grandmotherly barbarians charged into town like archers atop war elephants, armed with Sunset, Southern Living, Country Living, Country Home, French Country Style, Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, and/or Martha Stewart Living, not to mention the platinum edition DVD boxed-set of This Old House (complete with the Bob Vila action figures for the grandkids). 

In those exciting days of yore, those wildcatting hell-for-leather matriarchs—when not on weekend treasure hunts for vintage fixtures and period stained glass, or berry-picking to make that perfect Amish cobbler, followed up by a drumming circle at Barb’s—pushed through all that local legislation establishing strict noise and vagrancy laws, as well as founding both the Farmers and Saturday Markets, turning the local swamp into a wetland, establishing the Berryweather High Summer Fruit Festival, and requiring all of the parks to post informational signs about the prehistory of the long-gone native peoples. 

Due to their efforts, within ten years our Merryweather was sporting those neo-Arcadian necessities of a yoga studio, a Saab dealership, flower baskets hanging at every downtown intersection, and an organic bakery selling creations with no calories.  Meanwhile, the formerly dark and meditative hillsides ‘round about were scattered-o’er with housing developments like fast-food boxes dropped from the sky. 

That magical age of confusion and creation, however, ended about five years back when all the vineyards hereabouts were struck with bud blight, the winery-tour weekends slowed, and the real estate market flattened.  By then, however, Merryweather had settled into its current status as an upscale rural enclave.

Primaeval Merryweather, or Blood, Sweat, and Beards

But what can we tell about ye olde Merryweather, its crawling from the slime, its first flowering--or maybe its starting over in some Wild West witness protection program?



Eleazar Meriwether



Merryweather came about in this wise.  Our little piece of paradise was originally the land claim of one Eleazar Meriwether, one of those small-eyed fellows with a huge beard, floppy felt hat, and a resistance to malaria who sprang out of the horizon in days gone by, a star-spangled daguerreotype who took advantage of the absence of any lawful authority to make himself chieftain-in-chief.

In the next generation, one of his semi-legitimate children (the moldy records in the Merryweather Historical Society basement suggest either Vercingetorix or Scipio Africanus Merriwether, his "wives" being Rebecca-Evangeline Littlesmall and/or Sophia Mewseyford) managed to lure the railroad to chug a choo-choo through town.  But the boom started in real earnest when Vercingetorix Merriwether (or maybe Scipio Africanus) looked the other way as the Freemasonic hazelnut and prune planters muscled out the good strong Methodist farming folk.  This also gave the local political machine a creaky giddy-up push (and it has been in motion ever since).

We do not know what this heir to Eleazar Meriwether thought as he contemplated the dark hills round about and the rows and rows of hazelnut and prune saplings running into the horizon.  But we certainly know what his children (Priscilla, Hiram, George, Isaac, Henry, Betha, and Augusta Merrywhether) and his forty-one grandchildren ended up with: a watercolor lithograph of Populist-Era prosperity and respectability, complete with blocks and blocks of books-in-the-black businesses, an agricultural college, an immense bronze fountain with the symbolic figures of the Prune Harvest and the lovers Corylus and Avellena, ultramodern architecture in the form of Arts and Crafts cottages, bubblers to stave off rampant drunkenness, and a boulevard lined with Queen Anne mansions and elm saplings.  (Saplings abounded in those days.)

That Silver Age took on a bit of tarnish when the railroad, the descending aortic artery of any thriving local economy in those days, took a beating from the automobile and the motorway.  (The city fathers of Merryweather (specifically, Edgar Edwin Merryweather) described state route 4 bordering the old Pringle prune ranch as a "significant highway," but no one quite bought it.)  Finally came the 1950s and the interstate, which never bothered to veer close to town, and Merryweather fell into small-town sleepiness, its slumber to be broken only by a kiss tasting suspiciously like Pinot Grigio.

 

Through the bright canopy of a fall-time walnut tree, its leaves Robert Frost yellow, the October sun shone in glints and glances upon an impromptu memorial service that dear old Connie had thrown together for Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, whom no one had seen in about a month.  The muted light was probably for the best, since one might misinterpret someone squinting in the bright sun as being in the first stage of weeping, and really, no one liked Marjorie Mayfield very much.  Wherever she was, dead or alive, the unspoken consensus seemed to be that she had better just stay there.

Dear old Connie had posted a notice of these obsequies on the bulletin board at Summerfield Estates, then paid for a blurb in the Silver Tsunami newsletter, and crossed her fingers.  At the tepid response, however, she just told herself that this handful gathered under the big old walnut tree, its leaves as gold as the dome of a Byzantine church and its nuts like meteors bonking the picnic table and an occasional head, well, these folks were the ones that loved Marjorie Mayfield the most.

Despite their small number, they embraced the spectrum of Merryweather humanity: the narrow-eyed Jay-Douglas "Doogle" Hanson and his fungal amanuensis Anjay Shapurian (no one, even Anjay, was quite sure what nationality he was--but in Merryweather almost everyone had been brainwashed to believe that nationality did not exist); the billiard-ball bald Radu Prinzulescu and his toad-like mother, Maria, looking very much like a Transylvanian barn spirit; the elderly but undiminished Geoffrey Durant-Dupont and his longtime housemate Andreas Stackenwalter, with their Pekingese; and finally young and hale Marco Panzi and Michael Peighsley, whom some (read Doogle and Anjay) whispered were present just to get face-time with any grieving relatives and make a buck by selling off whatever was stewing in Marjorie Mayfield's condo.  But, then, so were Doogle and Anjay.  For as they lifted their plastic dishes of gourmet ice cream, dodged a few black walnuts, and shared highly-edited reminiscences of the mysteriously missing Ms. Marjorie Mayfield, Doogle and Anjay were recalling what she had always said: So many jackals, so few carcasses.

The faithful stood about for a few minutes with their cups of ice cream (which somewhere no doubt was seen as the food of the dead) and smiled pleasantly at one another.  Since Connie had worked hard to put this whole shindig together and was such an angel, it would not do to break her heart.

But in time, everyone (gratefully) dispersed, leaving Connie to gather up the ice cream-coated spoonlets and serving cups and place them in one of those leaf-green Bye-O degradable garbage bags: her little contribution to the Keep Merryweather Green campaign.  With this service to our little town out of the way, she slipped the tops on to the tubs of Cha-Cha Cherry, Mustafa Mocha-Chocolate, Cumulus Cloudberry, and Little Black Bits Vanilla and sighed.  She would have to bring all of this ice cream home, and with her husband being diabetic and even at 79 Connie still trying to keep her figure...But let her freezer bulge.  Anything for a friend.