Quast, Betty, nee Robinson. It was 20 past 12 noon on the sixth day of March. I was slumped in semi-slumber in a comfortable rocking chair that was a keepsake favourite of my Little Lady’s. The sun shone warmly through the double-glazed window that gave me a sweeping view across the sparkling snow-covered back acres of the farm. My cell phone vibrated in my inside vest pocket, snapping me awake.
My usual salutation, “Hopkins here,” was followed as usual by the question, “Are you Barrie?” which, once again, as usual, I answered “Yes.” The caller said “I’m sorry to call you, but I know you’d want to know. Joe’s wife, Betty, passed away this morning.” After the accustomed courtesy thank-you, I hung up, leaned way-back as way-back thoughts churned rapidly through my mind.
I first met Betty back when she still clung to the name of Robinson. It was way-back when they still held monthly dances in the local schoolhouse, then known as S.S. #10, Eramosa. I’m sure it was well before she met her later-to-be-husband Joe.
When the square dance caller requested another couple over here, it was she, Betty Robinson, who grabbed my arm and yanked me, from hugging the wall, out onto the dance floor. It was Betty and her sister who taught me how to dance. My age hovered in the early teens at the time.
When the Little Lady and I first married, our initial home was an old, original log farmhouse. It had seen better days and had some years earlier been stuccoed. It was set well back on a curved farm lane, giving us the privacy with which we felt comfortable.
Not long after, a live-in trailer arrived in the corner of Betty’s dad’s farm next door. We were told that Betty and Joe, our new neighbours, were going to build their new home there. It was from there, on cold winter nights, that they climbed the two barbed wire topped fences to cross the field and visit. TV was then beyond the depths of both our and their pockets, so the pleasant visits, prior to lunch, usually included games of cards, checkers, Chinese checkers, or crokinole.
During the 11 years that we were neighbours, children arrived, both theirs and ours. If on rare occasions money jingled in their or our pockets, enough for a night out, babysitting courtesy was exchanged. When our oldest son, born the 13th of February, during deep snow, it was Joe and Betty who watched from their window, making sure help was not needed, while I dragged the four-day-old new arrival, warmly tucked in his mother’s arms, on a toboggan, over the long lane’s snow-banked, up-and-down humps, from the car at the road to the house.
Later, while visiting us in our new country home, which we had built on my dad’s farm, one country block over, it was Betty and Joe who kept us company during the hours that crept well into the wee small of the morning, while we waited at the hospital to have a cast placed on the broken arm of our 6-year-old second son. He had slipped and fallen, while misbehaving, in our open-railed upstairs hall.
Joe and Betty have visited me on two or three occasions during the last several months, and I would be stretching the truth if I were to suggest that the call was unfortunately not unexpected. The writing was on the wall. Time has a way of taking its toll.
Nevertheless, if early-life neighbours could be fairly assessed on a scale of one to ten, my memories of Betty would have her snuggled somewhere between the numbers of 11 and 12. That is the Betty the Little Lady and I knew.
Take care, ’cause we care.
barrie@barriehopkins.ca
519-986-4105