Illustration by Danny Elchert
We needed to find a house halfway between my husband’s new job, deep in southern Illinois at the Fort Kaskaskia/Pierre Menard Home State Historic Site, and mine in glossy Brentwood, Mo. Andrew, who’d lived in Illinois most of his life and loved small towns, pored over real-estate websites for hours on end. I looked over his shoulder, but I couldn’t concentrate. Flashbacks: age 10, a road trip to pick apples at Eckert’s, golden sunshine, a bumpy wagon and the acidic smell of cider. Age 19, my mother’s terrified voice: “Just don’t let him drive you over the bridge to the East Side.” Age 25, a bumper-to-bumper drive through Our Lady of the Snows’ Way of Lights.
That was it. My entire set of associations with The Other Side of the River ended about 12 miles east of the Mississippi.
“Is Jeannette OK?” our friends asked in worried, almost hushed tones. “What if I get sick?” my mother-in-law asked in a small voice. Andrew, by now thoroughly exasperated, sighed. “We’ll send word ahead and saddle up, and we won’t rest the horses until we reach St. Louis.” By now I knew that our new home would be half an hour’s drive from our South City bungalow. Closer than Chesterfield. But when I broke the news to a West County friend at her birthday party, an older woman patted her consolingly. “Don’t worry, dear, it’s a weekend trip.”
I had to be kind to these people; I’d shared their biases just weeks earlier. Then I’d fallen in love with a 1917 house in the old part of Waterloo. I stopped humming the theme to Green Acres off-key to remind Andrew of my sacrifice and started looking for somebody to rip off the house’s only flaw: the pastel Victorian birds, grapes and flowers clustered on every wall. “Best thing you could do, lady, is just paint over ’em,” three St. Louis contractors in a row informed me.
Then I met our next-door neighbor, Mark, a plasterer. “Got just the person for you,” Mark said with a grin. “My old high school biology teacher went into the painting business. And he used to live in your house.” John came over gladly and told us delightful stories about his kids’ pranks in the house—and the long-glued birds didn’t scare him away. “Small-town network,” Mark explained with a quick nod. “You can find anything you need.”
It played out again and again, and people’s warm willingness to help weighed hard against a few rude shocks to my urban-liberal psyche. Like when Andrew made me remove my “Republicans for Voldemort” bumper sticker. Or when we went to Rural King and I found this great flannel shirt lined in polar fleece and the label said “Made in America for Americans.”
We settled in, faster than I ever could have dreamed. With our house still strewn with ladders, hammers and cardboard boxes, we hung some pine roping on the front porch—because front porches seemed to matter here.
One night in mid-December, I got home, threw my briefcase down in exasperation at the traffic (all on the St. Louis side) and kicked my shoes off. “Honey, come here!” Andrew called, just as I heard a raucous loudspeaker sort of music from the front of the house. I slid my shoes back on, looked out the front door and what to my wondering eyes did appear? A float, all lit up, pulled by an old red sedan. “Come get your presents!” Santa was calling, leaning out of the float’s window as “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” screeched behind him. Holding hands like a couple out of a Frank Capra movie, Andrew and I hurried out into the street, took two holiday-printed pencils from an elf and, grinning, wished Santa and his elves Merry Christmas. There was no sign, no obvious sponsorship by Kiwanis or Eveready or anybody else. It felt random, and happy. We laughed and thanked them and turned to go back inside. “Wait a minute!” Santa called. “Rudolph wants to talk to you!”
OK, this was getting surreal. We walked back. Rudolph was apparently the older gentleman driving the … er … sleigh, and he nodded briskly toward one of our front windows. “I was born in that room,” he said. “My grandfather built this house, out of Waterloo brick.”
He promised to tell us more someday and drove off. Dazed, we waved goodbye, goofy smiles on our faces, then opened the gate and climbed the front steps.
It was our home now.
