Miss Watkinson

It was Jay’s comment about the caterpillar webs that he saw on the side of the thruway.  We were traveling north, on our way to Canada for a week’s vacation.  “Oh no” I think I even slapped my head “I forgot to tell you about the caterpillar web.  It was this big”; I spread my hands wide to illustrate, “in the birch tree.  I forgot all about it, it was probably two weeks ago that I saw it.” As he drove, I saw his face register surprise, then resignation.  So many things we both tend to forget these days, while juggling jobs, household, garden, and other obligations; a symptom of lives too busy.  “I was going to knock it out, but I wanted to show you.  I thought you might want to set fire to it or something”, I finished lamely.  “Smoke ‘em’” Jay shouted over the whistling air from his open window “You have to smoke ‘em out.”
 

Miss Watkinson shifted into my minds’ eye.  A flashback of my youth.  She was petite, with skin so white and papery, one could almost write a letter on it.  She wore metal rimmed glasses, her dark grey eyes sharp and attentive behind them and navy blue dresses all the time, or so I remembered, or so it seemed.  The dresses were forties styles, tailored, modest.  Most were solid, but some had a small flower pattern. Sometimes, a lace-edged hankie poked out of a pocket at the top. Sensible shoes on her very small feet.  She drove a small, sensible, grey sedan.

Miss Watkinson lived in a rustic log cabin on the north shore of Long Island, in a thickly wooded hamlet called Mt. Sinai.  In the 1950’s, there were summer ‘bungalows’ tucked into those mountain- laureled woods, and the summers were made for kids to bike up and down the tarred and sanded roads, go to the beach as much as possible, and catch lightening bugs in jars at night while the grownups gathered around an outside fire, telling stories and having a few beers.  We were city kids who arrived pasty and white the day after school let out, and went back to the city like browned pecans the day after Labor Day, to get ready for school.

Miss Watkinson lived in a cabin across the way, and down the road a little.  My Mother said she ‘went to business’, and lived there all year long, even the winter.  I couldn’t imagine it.  But that was why we hardly ever saw her, my mother said, and business was down in Wall Street, in New York City.  We never knew, and never asked what she did there.  My mother often commented  ‘’She leaves in the dark and comes home in the dark, what a strange life”.  Sometimes we saw her on the weekends; my Mother would say on Saturday mornings to my uncle “I saw Minnie out and about earlier”.

Minnie.  When I was young, I could only equate her with Minnie Mouse – who else had a name like that? Her dark grey, curly, close cropped hair could easily have sprouted rounded ears, like the Mouseketeers.  And she wore those black, rounded, sturdy shoes, and she was very quiet.  Miss Watkinson’s smokin’ em out forays  were the hot dinnertime topic that night at the small pine table, at the edge of the knotty pine paneled living room.  Probably we were eating a salad of iceberg lettuce with tomato wedges and French dressing, corn on the cob, and fried chicken.  I was a tireless chicken leg eater. 

Earlier, my mother had stopped the car to chat with Miss Watkinson on our way to the farm stand.  Miss W was wearing her Saturday brown trousers, and some nun-looking brown oxfords, well worn and scuffed.  Her shirt was of a soft fabric, buttoned down the front. She told my mother, in a quiet, precise manner, that she would be ”smoking them out” that very evening, as soon as it started to get dark.  Miss W was after the yellow jackets, my mother told my uncle over dinner.  “She waits until they go into their nest to sleep, and then she puts gasoline on a rag and winds it around a tall stick and sets fire to it, and then she said “and Margaret, I smoke them out.”  “Well saints preserve us”, my mother had intoned, as we drove away slowly.