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It was hot and she spent hours weeding a flower bed, three wheelbarrows' worth, and came back to the porch happy and dripping with sweat.
When I met her in 1992, she was a freelance violinist in Manhattan, a Minnesotan trapped in semi-poverty by her love of classical music. We had a three-hour lunch, I fell in love. Nothing was said about yardwork.
But here she was, in 2021, giddy after hours of weeding in the hot sun, the very thing I hated most growing up and so became a writer in order to avoid. I edit; I don't weed.
The misery of weeding was what led to slavery. In the South, they couldn't bear to work in the fields in that heat so they bought people in chains and beat them up.
Slaveholders were people just like us who liked to be comfortable and that meant making other people hoe the cotton.
You realize this on a hot day. But the beauty of love is that it leads you down a long path of discovery whereby you come to understand another person, and here was my love, sweat pouring off her, feeling exhilarated about weeding.
She felt like going to the theater that evening so we drove to Old Saybrook and went to a show at The Kate, a little theater named for Katharine Hepburn who had lived nearby.
It was a comedy by the Ephron sisters, "Love, Loss & What I Wore," and I noted, sitting down, that I was one of a handful of men in the room, fewer than a jury, and the thing got underway, and I sat silent, surrounded by laughing women.
A lot of jokes about the emotional ties of various outfits. I met Nora Ephron once, walking along Broadway at 79th Street, and we stood and talked and I was struck by what a kind soul this famous funny woman was. So I'm disposed in her favor. But I didn't laugh.
About halfway in, the play gets onto the subject of bras and boobs and here the real hysteria set in. Women screeching and shrieking at jokes that, had a man said one at a dinner table, he would've been shamed and maybe sent to his room.
My wife, who is my judge and jury when it comes to comedy, was laughing. Boobs, the problem of flat-chestedness, the search for the perfect bra: all hilarious to the women around me, material for which a man would be heartily condemned as juvenile.
I think it was the hot weather that affected them. We are all sinners in extreme heat. You lie awake at night listening to mosquitoes and in the morning there's no milk for your coffee and something snaps and you put on your mask and go to the store and — Sacre bleu! there's a pistol in your hand! — and you tell the lady to open up the cash drawer.
But this is a small town, and she says, "Oh go home and soak your head, Keillor. You don't impress me with that little peashooter. Go back to bed and get out on the other side." An old writer on the brink of felony is saved by the kindness of a neighbor. I'm sure it happens all the time.
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Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "The Lake Wobegon Virus: A Novel". Buy it at a 33% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.