The Day Her Head Fell Off
When a spouse dies, it seems that the one thing all widows and widowers have in common is loneliness. Even those who appear to be living a normal, happy life are secretly lonely. For those who have not lost a mate, you wouldn’t understand the emptiness of missing the other half of who you are.
My mom was widowed at the young age of 51. It took her years to find happiness in companionship again. Up until that day, I witnessed her trying to make it through each day lonely, and it was sad. I was living in the same house at the time and helped to maintain the property.
Living in a small house behind us was the old widower, Swede. He had lost his wife to a stroke many years before my dad was killed. Swede handled his loneliness by sharing his home with his rescue-dog, Digger O’Dell, and medicating with his friend, Canadian Mist. Swede at this time was in his mid-80s. He was a man’s man. He was employed, as a teenager, on a steam tug which hauled log booms across the sound from the Olympic Peninsula to lumber mills on the Seattle and Tacoma waterfronts. As he got older, he was a spar tree setter, meaning he climbed to the top of fir trees in a logging site and set the block for the cable which pulled the downed trees up to the log trucks. His last job before he retired was as a lineman for the power company.
Swede taught me everything I needed to know about hunting, and fishing and he loaned me all the guns and fishing gear I needed to get started as a real outdoorsman. Although he wasn’t an educated man, he knew a little bit about everything.
One day, when he was only slightly under the influence of the Mist, he ambled over to our house in his overalls where mom was busy sewing in her study. He knocked on the back door and mom answered.
“Well good morning, Swede. What brings you over on this sunny spring day?” she asked.
“Well, gal-darn it, Pat. I was wondering if we could have a spot of tea,” he said in his best British accent.
“Of course,” she said, and invited him in. The two sat at the dining room table for an hour talking and sipping tea.
Outside, at this time of year there appeared to be a blizzard. The tall cottonwood trees to the south of us were losing their cotton and the breeze was carrying it through the air and into the yards on our side of the street. The ground was covered and looked like there had been a light snowfall. As the cotton floated up against the house, it began to pile up like snow drifts.
It was a yearly event for us, and everywhere else in the county that had Cottonwood trees was experiencing the same blizzard.
Because people with allergies get plugged up when the cotton floats by, they assume that the cotton is the allergen, but this is not the truth. The cotton has no allergen in it but because it is sticky it picks up allergens from grasses and other trees that do have pollen. So, the cotton is just an innocent carrier.
“Look at that gal-darn cotton,” he said, and he pulled out his handkerchief to blow his nose. “It’s nothing but a mess. It blows into my house and gets all over everything. Even my dog, Digger O’Dell, comes in from outside looking like he has been rolling in a snow drift.”
“I know,” mom said. “This afternoon I have company coming over and the driveway and sidewalks are covered. It will get tracked into the house and make a mess.”
“I plan on sweeping the sidewalk before they come, mom,” I assured her.
“Well hold on, gal-darn it,” Swede bellowed. “You don’t need to sweep nothing. I’ve got one of those electric leaf blowers. That will get rid of it.”
It seemed like a brilliant idea. Swede ambled home and returned with the blower and a large coil of extension cord draped over his shoulder. Digger O’Dell walked closely by his side.
“Find some place to plug the cord into, Marty. I’ve got to try this out. We could be the hit of the neighborhood.”
Finding a plug-in in the garage, we unrolled the cord and plugged in the leaf blower. Swede turned it on, and starting out on the lawn, he began blowing the cotton toward the house. Instead of staying on the ground, it became airborne again and turned into another blizzard. Still, the old man thought it was doing some good and he kept swinging the blower back and forth, moving the cotton around.
In mom’s rock garden, was a small ceramic maiden who had been there for years. She said that it made her happy when she looked out through the kitchen window and saw the maiden out in the garden. Swede, now blowing cotton through the garden, accidentally hit the maiden with the air blast which toppled her over breaking her head off.
Swede shut off the blower and we both stared at the maiden. We didn’t know how mom would react to the bad news.
“Gal-darn it!” or something like that, Swede mumbled. “I’ve got some Super Glue in my kitchen drawer next to the sink. Run over to the house and get it. We’ll glue it back on before your mom finds out.”
Running over to Swede’s “house of confusion,” I found the tube in the same drawer with two bananas, which had been over-ripe a long time ago. There was always something rotting in his kitchen. I made a hasty return back to Swede just to get away from the smell.
“Slop some of that glue around the neck and stick the head back on,” he told me. “And don’t get any of that goop on your fingers or you’ll glue them together.”
Carefully gluing the neck, I gently placed the head back on the body and held it there while the glue set up. I handed the tube back to him and he placed it in the back pocket of his coveralls.
“Looks good as new,” he said. “Don’t tell her we broke it.”
“We broke it?” I asked.
“Come on,” he growled. “Let’s finish with this cotton.”
The blowing once again started but the cotton was impossible to control. It just mounded up in big drifts against the base of the brick house. Swede shut off the blower.
“Well, this ain’t working like I thought,” he said. “It’s like trying to herd bubbles. Even if we blow it beyond your house, it’s all going to blow into my house. We have to think of a way to get rid of it.”
“How about a shop vac?” I suggested.
He pondered that idea for a moment.
“Hmmm, maybe,” he said quietly.
Then, an idea popped into his mind, through the haze of the Mist.
“I’ve got it!” he said. “Go over to my garage and bring back the weed burner. We’ll torch the cotton.”
It seemed like a good idea to me. With a jack-of-all-trades like Swede, I could trust his good judgment. I brought back the propane tank with the hose attached to the weed burner.
“Okay, I’ll show you how to turn this thing on. Here’s the striker. You take it around the house where the cotton drift starts and start burning it this direction. I am going to take a sit-down on this garden stool and have a snip of the Mist while you’re working.”
He sat down and rocked back and forth until he felt comfortable, then pulled a flask from his coveralls. While he sipped, he played in the drift with his boots.
“Gal-darn stuff,” he mumbled.
Going around the house to the start of the drift, I set down the propane bottle and opened the two valves. Hearing gas leaking from the burner, I held the striker out in front of it and scratched a spark. The explosion was louder than I had expected. I rubbed my mustache feeling the hair fall off in my fingers. Taking the tip of the weed burner, I carefully placed the flame into the drift.
Did you know that cottonwood cotton burns like gun powder? There was a bright flash, and it was gone. And the flash shot around the house, and I heard a loud scream.
“Bring the gal-darn garden hose and put me out,” he yelled.
Mom, hearing the commotion, came running from the house. She had never seen Swede smoke so bad since he had his five pack a day tobacco addiction. The laces were burned off his boots, and his coverall legs were setting off small sparks, but a good squirting of water put him completely out.
“Well, these coveralls are shot,” he grumbled. “My butt feels like it’s on fire. Check me out.”
He stood and turned around. There was nothing burning, but his back pocket appeared to have some discoloration. I walked up and took a closer look. It had the familiar smell of super glue.
“You sat on your Super Glue tube,” I said. I tugged on the seat of his coveralls, but they did not pull away from his body. His coveralls and boxer shorts were adhered to his right buttock.
“Well, gal-darn it! Take me to the hospital.”
By the time we entered Emergency, Swede was nearly completely self-medicated and barely felt any pain at all as they cut off his clothes. After careful examination and consulting between themselves, the nurses gave him some cream for his now hairless legs, and it was decided that the simplest way to deal with the glued area was to leave it, and the cloth would gradually pull away from the skin. On his medical chart, next to the name, Swede, the nurse put in parentheses the second nickname for the cantankerous old man — “Patch.”
When we left the hospital, his boots and coveralls had been tossed into the garbage. He rode back home in socks, a pair of Depends, and a hospital gown. He smiled at the crowd in the waiting room as he passed through, and commented all the way home on how cold my vinyl seats were.
As time went on, Mom found herself a good job, made new friends, and toured the world. She later remarried, and the loneliness slowly faded away.
As more women in the neighborhood became widowed, Swede and Digger had more homes to visit for a spot of tea. Whenever I would stop over to check on the old mountain man, he had to keep reminding me, “The name is Swede. Stop calling me Patch.”
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