My Pal Louise
My pal Louise Dusenbery just turned 98 this week. She and I have a special history. Louise met my flight at mid-Missouri’s Columbia Regional Airport in October 1988 and drove me to the country home Kit and I soon named Breakfast Creek. Our seven acres that included a limestone house, pond, barn, and mixed woods. It was across the road from the white clapboard home that Louise had designed and built herself in the 1960s on a forty-acre parcel of woodland and meadow. Dinner that night was at a Pizza Hut in Jefferson City where we had Louise’s three favorite foods—pizza, Oreo cookies, and Pepsi. POP for short.
From the get-go, Louise knew she was there if we ever needed her advice, but she could manage her own yard work without anyone’s help, thank you. Mowing was her forte. For forty-five years, she mowed the considerable 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. For 16 years Kit mowed 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.
During election season when their mowers quieted late in the fall, their friendly competition heated up again. The first time we put up campaign signs supporting Democrats, Louise hammered in just as many and more for the Republicans. Kit then suggested she put up “Coolidge for President,” signs since she’d been a Republican since 1924 and that was that.
During our shared years as neighbors on Westbrook Drive, Louise filled her garden with gazing balls and bought a hammock. Like everything I’ve come to associate with Louise, it was a classy model— a Pawley’s Island 1889-1989 Centennial model—doublewide in girth for napping with your sweetie or lounging alone with a romance novel you’ve been dying to read. Summer evenings she and her boyfriend Carl Henry would ease back-side first into the hammock and swap corny jokes or listen to a Cardinals baseball game on her portable radio until the fireflies came out.
When we moved to Boomerang Creek seven miles away as the crow flies, she sold her home and moved into quiet subdivision near our gravel road. One afternoon, 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.”
When Louise turned 90, she invited me to ride shotgun with her to Van Buren, her hometown in Carter County, MO where she grew up on her parent’s farm five miles outside of town. Located in a narrow valley between precipitous Ozark hills and hollers, this landscape—like Louise--is a unique Missouri treasure.
“Absolutely,” I said, eager to see the neck of Ozark woods in southeastern MO that had shaped this amazing woman’s coming of age years. “We’ll have lunch with my cousin Alice Dusenbery,” she added.
True to her word, Louise arrived at 6:00 a.m. the following Monday, ready to set out for Van Buren—a drive she claimed she could make with her eyes closed but promised she wouldn’t. In exchange, I promised not to bring up the subject of J-turns and the seemingly endless roundabout construction project at Ashland’s Highway 63 overpass. Knowing Louise, her opinions on the subject would fill all 3 ½ hours of our drive.
During the drive, I learned about Alice—a spirited, Iowa-born South Dakota transplant who’d married Louise’s cousin--the handsomest boy in Van Buren—after they met in Ohio during WWII. She remained Louise’s oldest and best friend until she passed away a few years ago.
Lunch that noon was fried chicken, coleslaw, and macaroni salad in Alice’s kitchen. Then the three of us drove to the Dusenbery section of Van Buren’s cemetery where Louise’s grandparents have a large family plot. Louise’s headstone is already in place, save for the final date. “Now you know where I’ll be when that time comes,” she pointed out.
Kit and I called Louise the morning of her birthday. She’s still lives alone in her home in Ashland, but finally sold her car. Too many roundabouts to negotiate, she gets lost and no longer feels safe driving. Neighbors deliver her groceries, and the postman sees that she gets her mail. The town and world have changed, and she’s not one bit happy about it. We’ve promised to visit if she lives to be 100. And knowing my pal Louise, she will.
