My Little Town

Just two houses down the street lived Mrs. Dudley. She wore flowered dresses, often protected with an over-the-shoulder apron, and her thin, gray hair was pulled in a tiny, tidy bun at the back of her neck. She was very much a lady. She wore black rubber knee protectors and had a rug she carefully folded and put under herself when she tended the flowers. Other times she wore canvas wedgie-type shoes, navy blue in color, with heavy cotton stockings on her legs. She was in her 80s, which seemed impossibly old, and her most remarkable feature was her dowager's hump. 

Behind her cottage was a big backyard that led to the river. There were tall trees for shade and flower gardens with lush growth of poppies, delphiniums and a riot of spring flowers from bulbs - tulips and daffodils and snowdrops and crocus.

In front, tucked between the sidewalk and the porch was a rambling flowering crab apple tree with white flowers giving way to "pea berries" or small hard green balls. You always grabbed a handful as you sailed by on your bike or walked under its branches. The boys loved to use them in pea shooters or sling shots.

We passed her house on our preferred route to church, to town, to school. I rarely ventured beyond the front porch that wrapped around, joining the parlor door and the everyday door. You just stepped up and there you were on the sloping floorboards. She sat on a wicker couch on the porch, with a faded flower chintz cushion at her back. She would sometimes be asleep when I sped by on my blue Western Flyer bike and I often made several trips to assure myself she hadn't died there on the porch in the afternoon heat. 

The porch was partially obscured by large hydrangea bushes on the everyday door side. Although I didn't know what those bushes were, they made a perfect screen from the street and they lent a dampness and coolness to the porch, even in the summer. 

One summer Debbie, Vicki and I spent many afternoons on that porch, sitting at Mrs. Dudley's  feet on the scratchy brown porch rug,  as she read to us from her old cracked leather copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I can still remember her pointing out those old pen and ink illustrations - so different than the riotous Disney version that had played at the Coudersport Theatre. We thought we were well past the age of being read to and made a solemn pact not to tell the others what we did each afternoon, behind the hydrangea bushes.

Mrs. Dudley had two handsome grandsons - contemporaries of my older brothers - who came to spend the summers with her. There were notorious for the trouble they caused. But, trouble back then and trouble today are two different things. I thought it was strange that those boys had no father. Their mother, a soft spoken lady who drove a foreign car with New Jersey license plates, dropped them off each summer and picked them up before school was to begin. But their father was absent - not dead but divorced it was whispered.

"I must tell you one of my memories of you that I love," Mrs. Dudley wrote on a card she sent me when I graduated from high school. "When you were about four years old, I said to you one day 'You are a lovely little girl Janie.' You replied, 'I know it, my Daddy tells me so.' I don't think your Daddy and I would have any quarrel now."

I was relieved that she hadn't mentioned this other memory from about the same time of my life (chronicled in my grandfather's Golly column here.)

The time came when Mrs. Dudley could no longer manage on her own in that little cottage just two doors down and her daughter came and loaded her up in the foreign car and she was gone. It wasn't long before a family with young children moved in and then the crab apple tree was cut down and the gardens grew to weeds.

(Click here to read another memory of Mrs. Dudley)