Back to the Future

My parents weathered the destruction by tornado of two different homes in the same town—Ankeny, Iowa—17 years apart. After the second tornado in 1990, with us kids all moved away and Dad in failing health, they packed it in and moved back to their hometown of Sibley, Iowa, attracted not only by the prospect of living near one of their children (my oldest sister Lois and her husband John) but by the slower pace of life. Sibley is a county seat town of about 3,000 in the far northwest corner of the state near the Minnesota border. All four Wissink kids—Lois, Jay, me (Bonnie), and Pam—were born there, and the town has changed little over the years. Dad died about five years after they moved back.

The Wissink sisters--Bonnie, Lois, Pam--enjoy a laugh with Mom
(September 2010)

My now nearly-88-year-old mother, fondly known to her descendants as Grandma Neva, lives in relative independence a few blocks from Lois and John, but though she still drives her ’91 Buick Park Avenue (only 80,000 miles on the odometer) for groceries and bridge, it takes a lot to entice her to leave town these days. Such as Skippy peanut butter being on sale for 99 cents at the Hy-Vee in Sheldon, or getting a hankering for a Perkins breakfast (in neighboring Worthington, Minnesota). Though she’s no longer up for the 500-mile trip to visit me in the Chicago area, I get to experience a little slice of vanishing rural America whenever I visit her.

Mom’s rented duplex is well-located with views of the municipal golf course, but even more conveniently sits just around the corner from the First Reformed Church. As we pulled into her driveway at precisely 3:00 p.m. on a recent Saturday afternoon, the church bells were chiming a hymn: “I Love to Tell the Story.”

“My goodness, Mom, that’s loud! How often does the church play the chimes? Doesn’t that bother anyone?” I asked her.

“Oh, no, we just got the chimes fixed and they play different hymns every hour,” she boasted. “I hardly even hear them.”

Mom has a big old radio tuned to the local station, where each morning she blasts the news report consisting of births, deaths, and hospital admissions and releases. On Wednesdays she plays Five Hundred at the Senior Center, where, she dispassionately reports, it’s harder and harder to get two tables together, what with various seniors’ ailments and some recent deaths.

But Mom’s great passion is playing bridge; she’s convinced that game alone is responsible for keeping her mind sharp. One of her two bridge groups recently acquired a new member, who is apparently having a little trouble gaining acceptance—especially with 92-year-old bridge whiz Zeda Thely—because “she’s not a very good player.” If someone leads the wrong suit or trumps inappropriately, Zeda leads the charge in pointing out their error, but Mom retorts with her still-sharp tongue, “Everyone makes mistakes—even you, Zeda!” They serve one another tried-and-true recipes from the church cookbook: peanut butter bars, rhubarb dessert, or that always-popular delicacy, Jell-o cake with Cool Whip. They play for pennies and nickels, and when I call Mom after one of her five-hour sessions, she gleefully reports what her take for the afternoon was: “I made 85 cents today!”

Each Tuesday morning Mom’s sewing group made up of her elderly cronies, the Chickadees—a moniker the group apparently relishes as it was affectionately bestowed by the church’s pastor—gathers at the church to sew quilts for the homeless, gossip, eat donuts and drink weak Folger's coffee. On Friday mornings, many members of the group reassemble to fold and compile the church’s Sunday bulletin with all its various inserts.

I hope that if and when I get to my ninth decade of life, I can enjoy a similar happy, healthy and peaceful lifestyle, with plenty of friends and family nearby. But hymns chimed every hour, world without end? I suppose if my hearing gets as bad as Mom’s, I could even tolerate that.