Louise at 100

Louise and I have a special history.  She met my plane when I first arrived at the Columbia Regional Airport in October 1988, ready to trade life in big cities for a house and barn on seven acres in the country.  My first night in Missouri, I stayed at Louise’s house across the road from Breakfast Creek—one she designed and built herself in the 1960s on a forty-acre parcel of woodland and meadow.  Dinner was POP, Louise’s three favorite foods on the planet—Pepsi, Oreo cookies and Pizza.

From the get-go, Louise made it clear that she could manage her own yard work without anyone’s help, thank you. Mowing in particular was her forté.  For forty years, Louise mowed the immediate acreage around her house to golf course perfection—a task that kept her in the saddle of her Sears Craftsman mower for nearly seven hours each week. 

Indeed, Louise set the neighborhood standard for a well-mown yard, and for our 16 years as neighbors kept Kit busy mowing Breakfast Creek’s green spaces to equal perfection in a friendly rivalry they both loved—one that accelerated to new heights when Kit traded in the old Craftsman mower we’d inherited for a flashy green and yellow John Deere. Louise gave him grief about it for weeks, then went out and bought a shiny new red Craftsman that was even prettier. When I bought a red Chevy pick-up one winter, Louise bought a baby blue Ford the following spring.

When their mowers quieted late in the fall, their friendly competition turned to politics.  Kit put up campaign signs at election time supporting local Democrats and Louise immediately put up even more for Republicans. Kit joked about putting up a “Coolidge for President” sign in her yard (he ran for office the year she was born).

After Louise was elected President of the Ashland Garden Club, she asked me what Ashland needed.  “Eyebrows,” I said. “Downtown street trees and flowers.”  While she was president, the Garden Club received the top individual award for civic development from the National Council of State Garden Clubs—national recognition for the group’s citywide landscaping efforts.

When Kit and I moved from Breakfast Creek to Boomerang Creek, Louise moved to a smaller house into Ashland.  She filled the backyard with gazing balls, planted trees, and gave up her Craftsman sit down mower days for good.  That move also inspired her to presented Kit with a hammock for Father’s Day. Like everything I’ve come to associate with Louise, it was a classy model that arrived with a priceless story.  The hammock was a Pawley’s Island 1889-1989 Centennial model—doublewide in girth for napping with your sweetie or lounging alone with a book you’ve been dying to read. 

In Louise’s characteristic self-reliant style, she loaded the hammock and its substantial forest-green frame into her red KIA SUV and drove it to Boomerang Creek.  After selecting a shady spot in our yard that she felt was the perfect place for her gift, the three of us assembled the base and suspended the wide rope hammock from hefty chains attached to either end of the frame.  Like icing added to an already rich cake, she snapped on a stripped canvas pillow and handed Kit a broom handle minus the broom. 

“This is your oar,” she proclaimed like a ship captain to a sailor.  “Now that you’ve retired after 40 years of university teaching, you’re navigating new waters. Use it to set your hammock sailing on days when the breezes slow to a dead calm and you’re stalled in the doldrums.”

She might not have said this in so many words, but I’m certain it’s what she was thinking. Louise rarely sits still, and will never be finished creating new gardens in her yard and in beds she and the Ashland Garden Club volunteers maintain around town.  But she dearly loved her swinging days when she and Carl Henry eased back-side first into the hammock she later gave us and spent lazy summer afternoons swapping corny jokes or listening to a Cardinals baseball game on her portable radio until the fireflies came out.

For her 95th birthday Louise joined us with some old friends for dinner on the porch at Boomerang Creek.  Kit had parked his cherry red Craftsman mower in the yard so she could take a ceremonial ride after dinner to celebrate their years of mowing rivalry. 

This week friends from the Ashland community were invited to Louise’s 100th birthday celebration on June 26th.  Cans of Pepsi or small bags of bird seed were suggested as simple gift ideas.  As we all know, Louise Dusenbery is and always has been a Duzy!  Happy 100th Louise.  From your pals across the miles and decades, Kit and Cathy.