The Dress I Wore and the Seat I Kept
The ground she came from
My husband Gordon Reinhart’s great-grandfather bought the first eighty acres in 1894 with money he made hauling coal, and the sign by our mailbox says Century Farm, because the state of Illinois gives you one when the same family has worked the same ground for a hundred years. We have had ours for a hundred and thirty-one. Gordon hung it himself, the spring Ashley was born, using a level, because he would not hang anything crooked.
Our daughter walked beans at eleven and drove the grain cart at thirteen, and she was the first Reinhart in a hundred and thirty-one years to go to a university with a name people had heard of. Gordon carried her boxes up four flights of stairs in Evanston and then went and stood by the truck for a long time with his back to the dorm. He was getting his face ready. She took a marketing job in Chicago afterward, and each time she came home she stayed a little shorter, and her good coat looked a little more like a coat from somewhere else.
We sold the south eighty to send her. We never told her. A girl does not need to carry that to class in her backpack.
Then Gordon got sick, the pancreas, fast, and Ashley took leave and slept in the room she grew up in for the four months it took. When we buried him at the Lindell Methodist cemetery, she stood next to me in the wind and did not let go of my arm for an hour. When she is not afraid of being looked at, she is the finest person I know.
She met Spencer Whitlow at a fundraiser two years later. He is a tall, soft-spoken young man, a lawyer for his father’s company, Whitlow Surgical Supply, which Bruce Whitlow built into something with a campus and a logo. Spencer came down to the farm in September and ate three helpings of my pot roast. I liked him. I still do.
And Camille Whitlow, his mother, I met at an engagement lunch in Glen Aldridge in October. She is a slender, silver-haired woman with beautiful posture and a laugh that sounds practiced, and she kissed the air next to my cheek and said, “Donna, we are just so thrilled, we have simply got to get you up here more.” I said I would try. I drove home with my hands tight on the steering wheel, though I could not have told you why.