Lights in the Darkness

With the Thanksgiving tables of Merryweather cleared of gluten, dairy, race and ethnicity, animal cruelty, and any reference to the Deity, the real distraction from the cold, wet, and gloomy parts of the year got underway: the annual Oh, Noel! Lightfest, hosted by The Strange Fruit Sisters.  (For the sake of the ignorant, the Strange Fruit Sisters is the local and colloquial moniker for a sizable band of rare Ruthenian Catholic nuns who, when not stringing multicolored lights through giant rhododendrons, hocking funnel cakes, and drugging camels so that they will be amenable members of the petting zoo, repent and pray at the--ahem--Sorbo-Ruthenian Women’s Monastery of the Blessed Charles of Austria and the Servant of God Zita Of the Exarchy of Blainesville.  These renunciants had garnered their nickname since their monastery (Eastern Christendom not having nunneries or convents, apparently) subsists in the midst of an overgrown, impenetrable, and abandoned orchard of persimmons, figs, seaberries, mulberries, jostaberries, and everything else that is not easily picked and shipped.  The previous owners (a branch of the nefarious Smiths--more of them in time) had donated it to the sisters in the hopes of a tax write-off--and a bribe to the Almighty.) 

  

The Oh, Noel! Lightfest, born a few years back, quickly became a staple event of the winter shopping season, with seniors from Helmut, Gardenburg, and Segue braving the nighttime roads in 14-passenger buses just to ooo! and aah! at all the lights.  (And Oh, Noel! was a far more wholesome Adventide outing than the Weihnachten Wine-Night-Out, which attracted the same crowd that had been watching the Christmas-movie marathon playing over and over on the Romance Channel since Halloween.) 

But not all of the seniors making the trip this year to Oh, Noel! came in a rickety lift bus operated by some non-profit.  No, a spiffy kingfisher blue Lombardia (the sole luxury vehicle produced by the Soviets), after safely navigating the black, ice skimmed to a stop by the main gate and dispensed a pair of gentlemen: the well-aged Geoffrey Durant-Dupont and his inevitable Teutonic shadow, the already familiar Andreas Stackenwalter.  These two oldsters stood a moment, both to let the blood flow to their heads (at a certain age one starts to stand with care) and to take in the scene.  As Herr Stackenwalter was scanning both the parking lot and the line of hot-cocoa holding attendees shuffling through the entry gate,  a young and devout volunteer was politely working her way up and down the queue came uip to them as they joined the line and handed them a flyer, a convenient map of the funland beyond; Andreas eyed her efficient progress up the line with care, while Geoffrey perused the offering.  "I did not know that we had an exarch," he said.  "Well, better an exarch than a heresiarch," he concluded, although not as hypocritically as in the past.  Since he had escaped the sticky clutches of Marjorie Mayfield, his religious observance--formerly standing in the back of church on Christmas and Easter--had widened and deepened.

"Did you ever meet Zita?" he asked, referring to the lady whose name graced the convent (or women's monastery, if you prefer).  Herr Stackenwalter as a German count had to have rubbed a few be-titled shoulders, but Andreas only grunted, having lost castle, his tapestries, and any feudal rights with the invasion of the Soviets.  (He had managed to hold on to his title and his posture.)   As the queue into the festival ambled on, Geoffrey did as well, but verbally.  "I did, in passing, outside of the gates of Solesmes, when mama was hiding herself there with the sisters.  She said that she was making a Lenten retreat..."

"But in truth she was hiding from..."  Andreas said, loosely recalling the story.

"Oh, those Albanians."  Now Andreas grunted significantly.  "Mama'd gotten a good deal on some of their crown jewels and the Reds thought that they should be returned to 'the people'.  That reminds me: I should break up Queen Géraldine's amethyst spray before the current regime gets wind of it."

"But Her Imperial Majesty?"

"Oh, Zita was a positive angel," Geoffrey said, taking an eco-friendly disposable cup of cocoa from the mittened hands of another volunteer.  "She would have made a lovely nun, but with eight children...You know, she dressed in black her whole life, you know, in mourning for her husband."  (The Blessed Charles who shared the billing on the marquee.)  "If ever I'd had a wife..." and as his wish trailed off, Andreas grunted again, ambiguously, and gave another scan down the line of shivering merry-makers.

But as they came to the gate, all of his watchful scrutiny bore some strange fruit indeed.

Merryweather Unleashed, Part I

The most dangerous people in Merryweather the Thanksgiving morn just past were the antisocial scofflaws who secretly loaded their dogs into the caged-off cargo spaces of their hybrid offroad sedans (whose manufacturers posed as sponsors on the fauxmercials between PBS programs on Saturday night) and with their unwitting, only-want-to-love-you hostages in tow, headed off in the frosty hours before dawn to the bleak and empty Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge, there to let the beasts run around as dogs are meant to--and maybe stir up a flock of snow geese or sandhill cranes.  (This gave the amateur wildlife photographers a chance at a nice action shot.) 

And this feast of lawlessness had to be on this day at this hour, since only then was there a good chance of avoiding a Parks and Rec deputy ready to hand out a ticket for allowing one's dog run free without a leash.

The Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge used to be just a muddy maze of pot-hole-pocked gravel roads running through a dystopian paradise of invasive weed species, all of it kept from the public by a couple of miles worth of chain link fencing.  In ye olden times, middle-aged bachelors would bring the pooches thither to run in the cool of the evening and while they shot a rabbit or two.  But as we learned, the ancient mothers of Merryweather had (after gerrymandering the boundaries to include key neighborhoods in the college town about twenty miles away) pushed through a measure to buy up the land, complete with its brackish ponds and sloughs full of waterbirds, and so was born the Tlasiwapsit't Wildlife Refuge.  (The eggheads in the college town said that they had to include the 't on the end of Tlasiwapsit't, otherwise they would be pronouncing it all wrong.)  The site was gussied up, given a paved parking lot, cedar walkways through the fens and reed beds, a guilt-inducing informational kiosk about the Tlasiwapsit people (the writer of the blurb in the kiosk did not care about the 't), and a gleaming sign declaring that dogs were forbidden, in order to preserve the native habitat.

So, this Thanksgiving morn, in the weak illumination in the chill fifteen minutes or so before actual sunrise, a few intrepid parties were disembarking from their hybrid adventure cars to throw into chaos their little corner of the world.

Through the main gates the drivers crept, in one hand drive-through mocha-mint lattes, but in the other no dog leash, for Lexi, Sasha, Bruno, Egon, and/or Shasta had already shot out of the vehicles like torpedoes, away into the frozen fog, with uninhibited, feral joy, eager after rabbits and voles.

But a few of canines this morning were not so enthused.  Squatting on the October-Revolution-red-leather front seats of a small, scarabesque foreign sports car sat a pair of Pekingese: Una and Olga, the wheezy reasons for the spendy veterinary and grooming bills accrued by Mssrs. Geoffrey Durant-Dupont, Esq. and Andreas Stackenwalter.  It was the latter gentleman, an elderly German in a National Volksarmee winter hat (ear flaps down) and 1989 army parka, who was in attendance on the palace dogs this morning.  But he had not come to this morning for a crepuscular jaunt over the hoar-becrusted mud trails.  Instead, leaving the golden beasts in the car (it was only 28 degrees...) Andreas Stackenwalter stationed himself outside of the driver's side door and stood there immobile, his breath like Hyperborean cigarette smoke.  To any eye catching sight of him that dawn, he was more forbidding than any pooch-precluding sign.  But no eyes were on him and his own gaze, aged but clear, was fixed like the sight of a rifle upon the gates of the refuge, where many a fleece-jacketed Merryweatherites with a Malinois mix was now quietly entering.

 

But no one had come out of the gate.  Yet.  Andreas Stackenwalter knew, though, that he would.  He would wait.

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.