JUNE 20, 2023 – (Cont.) For reasons I wasn’t told or didn’t understand, the Hanney’s up and moved to California when I was about seven years old. They owned an old, dark green car, small-finned car manufactured by a company that no longer existed. When moving day came, soon after the end of the school year, Mother took my sisters and me over to Hanney’s to say good-bye. There were hugs and kisses and tears. The moving van pulled away, and we left soon after that, while the Hanney’s tended to packing their car.
Mother cried on the way home. A while later, but not much later, she stuffed my sisters and me back into the car and drove across the river to Champlain, where she pulled off River Road, which led to the rest of the world. She wanted to catch sight of the Hanney’s—or Cyril, I thought—one more time. We waited and waited, but the heat made us fidgety, and eventually Mother yielded to our whining and drove back across the river to our house. After pouring us some lemonade, she took us with her back over to Champlain to resume her vigil. Finally, we saw the old green car with little fins coming south from Anoka. Mother leapt from our car and waved vigorously as the Hanney’s zoomed by and disappeared from our past into their future. I remember feeling sorry for Mother, who was still in tears.
Several years later, word came that Nell had died suddenly. In the spring of 1965, church was all abuzz with news that Cyril and the kids would be visiting Minnesota that summer. I remember when the red Volkswagen with California plates and a fully stuffed luggage rack on top pulled up to our house. Mother stepped outside, put her hands together and hooked them over her nose. Tears welled up in her eyes and spilled down onto her fingers. She then spread her arms apart to release her joy.
The Hanney’s stayed in Anoka for several weeks. Cyril himself stayed on the other side of town at the home of Mrs. Babcock, a widowed member of Trinity, who was gone much of the day, we were told. The girls stayed with friends, and Derwyn boarded at our house. He and I became pals. The red Volkswagen spent a lot of time in our driveway, often beginning shortly after breakfast. Somewhere along the line, there occurred a scene entirely alien to my 10-going-on-11-year frame of reference.
I had just passed through the living room into the dining room and was about to round the corner into the kitchen when I saw them. The pocket door between the dining room and the kitchen—almost always inside its pocket—had been pulled nearly closed. Through the opening that remained, Mother and Cyril appeared in a close embrace, swaying slightly from side to side. Neither of them could see me, and I stood there, utterly frozen in shock. The only people I had ever, ever seen Mother hug or hug Mother were Dad and my sisters. Yet here before my innocent eyes were Mother and Cyril, locked in the kind of embrace that told me, in all my naivete, that there was something between these two that went way beyond the laughter, the witty chatter, the singing, the painting lessons.
lI walked straight away badly shaken, and for the rest of the day and that evening, I was troubled by what I had seen. I wanted to tell Derwyn but was afraid to bring it up. I didn’t dare tell my sisters, because they didn’t believe much of anything I told them, and if I told them this, they would likely get mad as heck at me for making up something so outrageous. To whom does a 10-year old going-on-11 tell something like what I saw? No one. (Cont.)
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
