Category Archives: Big Stone Gap

His White, Square Heart

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My 71-year-old husband built me a downstairs office. From a musty dugout basement lined with concrete he created white walls and a safe ceiling (no asbestos) plus a floor made of durable earth-friendly wood and windows that let in all the light a basement can get. He used bright-white materials so the light would be stronger.

He left the central wall’s original brickwork, even though he didn’t like it much, because he knows I think brickwork is cool and funky. He removed all the spiders he found because he has seen me run, shrieking in terror, from Daddy Long Legs.

It took him three months and something well above a thousand dollars, and he did it all himself—except when he had to determine which wires were live, which dead, running over the copper water pipes. For that he called in our friend X, a covert plumber here in town masquerading as a mine safety engineer. (X must not be outed; there aren’t many plumbers around here and his golf weekends would be crushed.)

Jack sealed cracks and underpinned flooring and shaved off door edges and cut special angles to cover protruding pipes. My husband did all that for me, because he wanted me to have a cozy space that I could call my own. Upstairs on the second floor, our private home is full of mind-grabbing, endless chores, while the bookstore is replete with people and noise and sales and inventory–not that we don’t like those things. They are the heartbeat of the bookstore.

But downstairs, with a comfy chair from a thrift store and a mantelpiece donated by a friend and an electric fire Jack hunted down on clearance, there’s a different kind of heartbeat. A quiet one. A steady one. An enduring one.

Jack said, out of the blue the other day as we doctored our respective morning coffees, “I built that space for you as comfortably and as carefully as I could, so you would have it forever.”

“I know,” I said, and kissed him on the cheek.

There are things couples don’t say, and then there are things couples don’t use words to say. When I sit downstairs in the white space that my husband’s hands created for me, I know, and he knows I know, that I’m sitting inside his heart. Cozy and warm, underpinning everything, letting the light in.

“Fill this bottle, Sir”

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Having been raised as a true Scots Presbyterian, I am of the generation that doesn’t go to the doctor unless you’re really, phlegm-producingly sick. This has resulted in a couple of serious incidents over the years, but the habits of a lifetime are deeply ingrained.

So it came to pass in my 71st year that Wendy finally persuaded me to have a health check. (Read: she made the appointment and threatened me.) Last Monday I duly presented myself at Doctor Ashley’s office and had my first proper check-up in ten years.

I’d taken along the medical history brought with me when I moved to the US from Scotland, and the academic paper on Nail Patella Syndrome that features a photograph of my toe-nails. (It’s a hereditary condition). To my great relief I received a clean bill of health – a surprise to Wendy, and I suspect even to the doctor!

But this wasn’t the end of it – oh no, not by a long way! This Monday I was scheduled for lab work. Admonished to fast beforehand and come early to deal with paperwork, when presenting myself at the counter, I admitted I’d had a breakfast bar at 7a.m.

The secretary said “whaaa?”

I repeated my crime, fearful now that I’d be turned away. She called in a senior member of staff, who asked me to “repeat that, please.”

“I had a breakfast bar at 7 a.m.”

“What’d you have?”

“A baaaaaarrrrrrr.” Experience has taught me that, when accents collide, strengthening the vowels can help SW VA ears.

“Yes,” said the woman, in the patient voice of one dealing with an imbecile. “But what was on it? Eggs? Bacon? Oatmeal? How much did you eat?”

Realization dawned at last, as my father-in-law is fond of breakfast bars—the Shoney’s kind, not the six-per-pack granola kind. I laughed and explained, she laughed and took me to the back—

–and poked me repeatedly, trying to get a vein. I told her a funny (now) story about a nurse years ago in Scotland with the same trouble. She bit her tongue and tried again. This became very unpleasant until she got what she wanted. I regretted telling her the funny story.

Several unspeakable samples and a couple of preventive shots later, I was wending my way home, a bandage the size of Russia around the drill site that had been my arm.

Satisfied, my darling Wendy?