An envisioning. 1969, and dawn starting to arrive at the house in Elizabethville on a fine morning in May.
Oh to be here.
The sky turning red and then orange. A cup of steaming hot coffee to sip out on the porch with the colors bouncing off the Hudson.
The new short story needing a good going over before the children wake up, and breakfast to make after. An entire day to go before starting up again on the typewriter.
Life just as it had looked to be from the happy stories in the Young Adult section at the library back in grammar school, but minus the children's nurses and laundry maids. Odd. So different it had already been by then. Nearly all mothers on their own, what with all the nurses and laundry maids off doing war work, welding battleships at the Brooklyn Shipyard, or making camouflage print raincoats for someone to wear with his coordinating helmet, in different colorways for which front he was fighting on. But only the old stories on the shelves, none with mothers who did anything after dinner other than reading a chapter of Winnie the Pooh.
But still . . . life a joy and being a mother a blessing but being stuck in a chalet that looks like Heidi's, but with its own wringer washer and one of those fancy outdoor drying racks that spins when you run under it as long as you are six and can fit underneath . . . something needing doing every hour with no time to sit and chat let alone kiss your fellow what with this one going off to work in the city from dawn to dusk.
Eyes squeezed shut against the blazing sun and a memory starting to shine of the dating parlor back at school . . . not quite like the picture in the desk drawer what with that one taken for the freshman bulletin . . . no sitting on your boyfriend's lap the day the photographer came but in real time . . . different it had been, especially the day the dorm mother got sick and it all went on downstairs until dinner time with no one the wiser.
Date parlor, Buckland Hall, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Page 9 of the Mount Holyoke Alumnae Quarterly for Fall 1956, published by the Alumnae Association of Mount Holyoke College in November of 1956. Collections of Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections. © Five College Compass. Fair use license. https://compass.fivecolleges.edu/islandora/object/mtholyoke%3A61016?search_api_fulltext=smoker