The Diploma I Earned at 64

Nineteen Below

Winter in central Minnesota does not care that you are sixty-two and trying something new.

By the middle of December the stop by the old creamery had a snowbank behind it as tall as I am, and the wind came straight down the highway off the fields.

The first week of January, the morning of my first day back for the spring term, the radio said it was nineteen below at six o’clock.

I put on two pairs of socks, my long underwear under my slacks, Ray’s old choring mittens over my gloves, and I started out the door.

Ray was standing in the entryway in his parka and his chopper mitts. He had his boots on and his cap with the flaps down.

He did not say anything. He just opened the door for me and followed me out.

We walked the three blocks to the creamery together, our boots squeaking on the packed snow the way it only does when it is that cold.

The streetlights were still on. The smoke from every chimney in town was going straight up like string.

At the stop he stood beside me with his hands in his coat pockets and his shoulders hunched, looking down the highway for the bus lights.

I said, “You don’t have to wait.” He said, “I know.”

The bus was eleven minutes late that morning because of the cold. Ray stood there the whole eleven minutes.

When the lights came over the hill, he stepped back and let me climb on, and he raised one mitten to Dennis, and he turned around and walked home.

He did that every Tuesday and every Thursday for the rest of the two years.

Rain, snow, the hot mornings in late August when the mosquitoes were bad. He never said why. I never asked him. Some things you ruin by asking.

Once in February I looked back through the bus window as we pulled away, and I saw him standing there a little longer than he needed to, watching the bus go, his breath hanging in the air in front of him.

I had to look at my accounting book very hard for a few miles after that.

That is the man I married. He does not say much at the Easter table. He says it at the bus stop at six-thirty in the morning, with his feet, for two years.

The Tax Exam

The hardest class was Individual Income Tax, the fall of my second year.

I had done our own taxes for forty years with a pencil and the instruction booklet, and I thought I knew something about it. I knew almost nothing.

I studied at the kitchen table every night that fall.

Ray would come in from the garage and look at the papers spread from one end of the table to the other and go eat his supper standing at the counter so he would not disturb anything.

The first exam was in October. I had studied for it more than I had studied for anything in my life, including my driver’s test in 1977.

I walked out of the room certain I had failed it.

I went into the library bathroom, the one in the back by the computer lab, and I sat in the stall and cried.

I cried the way you do when you are tired and old and wondering if your son was right after all.

Somebody knocked on the stall door. It was Kenzie. She had seen me go in. She said, “Linda, are you okay?”

I said I was fine, which is what women my age say when we are not fine at all.

She said, “I’m going to wait out here till you come out.” And she did.

When I came out she was sitting on the edge of the sink with two of my lemon bars wrapped in a napkin, which she had saved from that morning.

She handed me one and we ate them right there.

“Everybody bombed that test,” she told me. “Mrs. Lindquist said the curve is going to be huge.” It was not true. Mrs.

Lindquist had not said any such thing. Kenzie made it up so I would stop crying, and I knew it, and I loved her for it.

The grades came back the next week. I got a B. Kenzie got a C plus. She showed me hers first and said, “See? I told you.”

Then she saw mine and her mouth fell open and she said, “Linda, you liar,” and the whole row turned around to look at us laughing.