If You Lived Here, I'd Know Your Name: News From Small-Town Alaska by Heather Lende

Author:Heather Lende
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 156512524X
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2013-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

Grand Old Dames

ABOUT TEN YEARS ago I traveled to the Kenai Peninsula with Mimi Gregg for a state community-theater festival board meeting. We flew to Anchorage and rented a car for the two-hour trip south to Soldotna. On the trip, we talked about marriage and family, and Mimi told me that her long marriage to Ted was not an accident. He always let her try new things, and whenever they had a big fight her rule was, Will this matter in ten years? Usually it wouldn’t. “Take the long view,” Mimi said. “It works.” Mimi drove that wet, winding road through Turnagain Pass like Mario Andretti, chatting as if we were at her kitchen table. I thought I was going to die. I begged to take my turn at the wheel, pleading the case that my young children needed a mother. Mimi called me an “old fuddy-dud.” She was seventy-four.

Mimi’s friend Mildred Meisch also used to drive fast. She would cruise around town in her vintage Mustang or, later, silver T-bird and invite tourists to come for a ride, promising to show them the sites for free. She may well have been Haines’s first tour guide, spiriting delighted and no doubt increasingly alarmed tourists to her friend Nowyta’s place ten miles from town. “She druugg more people into my cabin than I can count,” Nowyta declared in her Texan drawl. “She knew any friend of hers was a friend of ours, and everyone was Mildred’s friend.”

Mildred, whose own Texas accent, heavy silver jewelry, tight red leather pants, and cowboy boots made her hard not to notice, died of congestive heart failure. She was eighty-eight years old. “That little woman was all heart,” Clint, the butcher and Mildred’s fellow Texan, told me. He said he knew summer had arrived when Mildred came in and ordered her chili beef. Mildred first saw Haines when she was eighteen. She came from Texas with her cousin, a military doctor, to care for his children while he was assigned to Fort Seward. She fell in love with another army doctor, H. M. “Doc” Meisch. They were married four years later in Texas. The Meisches returned regularly on vacation. When Doc died in 1980, Mildred decided to spend more time in Haines. As her friend Lola says, “She was a guest who came for the summer and stayed twenty years.”

After visiting Haines with Mildred and Doc, Nowyta (pronounced No-wheat-ah) decided to make Haines a permanent part of her life, too. Nowyta and her husband, Abe, summered here until he retired from Exxon, and then they moved up for good. When Abe died suddenly, Nowyta was lost. He was the love of her life for fifty years. She had to learn how to make the bed, she told me, because she had never done it by herself before. She sold their cabin, called “Happy Ours,” and now spends part of the year in Texas with her daughter and the rest in a rented house on Officers’ Row,

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