Take a hike
Westerfield, Nancy G.
TAKE A HIKE Nancy G. Westerfield Mine is a lifelong marriage. After forty-six celebrations of an August 1950 wedding date, I anticipate that only death will interrupt our pleasant union. The dread...
...Though considered oddities and mavericks-"Dr...
...It bought the train tickets that carried us off from Cincinnati to Oklahoma and his first faculty appointment...
...We add another in the summer: Sunday-morning worship for travelers at a Holiday Inn...
...From Oklahoma we moved to Texas, to Mississippi, on to Arkansas-always by train: a succession of temporary positions replacing professor-reservists called back to Korean War duty...
...Living in the "college slum" blessed us with a special affinity toward students, a "Pop and Mom" relationship...
...And so: the 100 pairs of shoes that I estimate I have walked my way through...
...The dread of death is that it will interrupt our walking...
...and Mrs...
...Howsoever, our marriage thrived, and though our lives have never lacked for momentum, walking has been for us a way to keep a marriage going...
...I had no such skill...
...We married fresh from graduate school, he with a Ph.D., I with a master's degree...
...As a homemaker, household management called for some plain and fancy footwork...
...Actually, in the summer of 1950, he had bought a car and was learning to drive...
...every afternoon or evening...
...Sturdy volunteer teams have gathered around these initiatives...
...Retirement presented fresh opportunities for willing feet...
...In robust health of body and spirit, we are girt and shod and street-smart for the rest of the journey...
...We rented...
...I walked, and I carried, carefully scheduling my portages...
...Once he ended in shock, after a shoulder-slalom down an icy driveway: the tragic walker...
...Problems talked over, problems solved, hopes and expectations shared...
...I still post the Saturday welcome signs at the inn, then set out at 7:15 a.m...
...the journey...
...Plans for the next trip abroad-eight of them, six by ship- made possible by sheer carlessness...
...Certainly, the nineteenth was a century of more stable commitments, as well as a century for thrift and self-sufficiency, "virtues" we have practiced...
...For forty-six years, late in the twentieth century, we have lived earless lives, never owning, never driving an automobile...
...Feet do...
...Finally, we located in states farther north with longer tenures: Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska, where at last we stayed...
...We never built or bought in suburbia...
...Plans for retirement years, which we chose to spend in our town of 25,000 on the plains of Nebraska...
...By this time, we knew that there would be no children, a simplification of our wanderings...
...We entered lay ministry, initiating from our Episcopal church three services read weekly, at two nursing homes and in the hospital chapel...
...Our honeymoon was that trip in a Pullman compartment...
...Did so choosing (we have never even owned a television, though I have no quarrel with electricity) equate with a lifelong marriage...
...Too, the old-fashioned academic community that we entered midcentury was familial, with maternal oversight of newcomers in its midst...
...on Sunday itself: both five-mile round-trips...
...The routine of our daily lives included for relaxation a walk (what else...
...Walker," we were dubbed on one campus-we never met with discrimination or pressure to conform...
...Cars couldn't start...
...Forty years of weather have gone by, step by step, underfoot, yet weather never kept us from job commitments...
...He sold it so that we could afford to marry...
...Ours would be academic careers, in a variety of small and larger communities across the United States, through lean and fat years of professional employment...
...Marriage Encounter, every day...
...At the end of the second millennium, a man and a woman chose to bond in a nineteenth-century style of life...
...We arrived with $78 between us...
...More than once, I was the only librarian to open the college library for students...
...Northern winters have been a fact of life ever since...
...Once I slipped with groceries, breaking half a carton of eggs over my head: the comic walker...
...Only one town ever had public transportation...
...Always, by force of circumstances, we lived close to the job...
Vol. 123 • November 1996 • No. 20
