“Oh, I…” he began and stopped when she gave him The Stare that I had grown up with.

“What do you know,” she told us, her eyes big, wondrous and childlike, “but I remembered where your father keeps the combination to the safe.”

“Mama, you’ll get in such trouble,” I said.

“Hardly,” she snorted, and gave her own version of Duncan’s ‘Huh.’ “Abraham Everett was penniless when he married me, and so I shall remind him, if he gives me an argument. My father – rest his soul – owned that brewery in New York, if you will recall.”

Thanks to my mother’s light fingers, we were laughing when we said goodbye. She saw to it that my lifetime pass on the Union Pacific Railroad was validated and sent to me. She wrote often and visited us several times in Oregon before she died, always the lady but infinitely more to me.

Oregon? How did we get to Oregon, you ask? First we had to suffer in Eeikish Pah, The Hot Place. But I am getting ahead of myself. For any of you who might be concerned, we were married a day later during a layover in Chicago. We splurged on a private compartment then and enjoyed two pleasant nights in each other’s arms from the Windy City to St. Louis, to Westport, Kansas, near Fort Leavenworth.

Insert

I am going to add these pages here. I’ll ask my husband what he thinks, since it truly involves him. It’s just a scrap, so I can discreetly remove it. See there, I marked it insert.

One doesn’t marry an Indian on a whim. Maybe someday in the future that won’t be one of the many factors to be considered in matrimony. I have to chuckle at myself. Our daughter Millie – short for Millicent Eugenie – heard all kinds of advice and admonition from Duncan and me, every factor known to concerned parents.

Only eighteen, Millie had accepted a proposal of marriage from a young man several grades ahead of her in high school. After two years at Eugene and a teaching certificate, he had been hired by the district to teach mathematics at Baker High School, where she was about to graduate.

We had numerous reasons why they should wait a little. Millie cut through them all. “I love him. He loves me. I’ve been watching you two all my life. I know what love looks like.”

They were married two months later. Who could have said no after that? His parents were startled, but they will recover.