The army sent a moving van owned by a man and his wife to pack up and move us back to Illinois. I remember she wore flowered coveralls and he wore standard ones. I liked the idea they could always work together and they seemed like a good team. All we packed was a bag to get us through a few weeks at his mother's house in Dixon, Illinois while he job hunted.
My husband's parents were much older than mine. In fact, his mother was close to my grandmother's age and his brother was the same age as my mother. His brother's daughters were almost the same age I was.
Ronald Reagan grew up just a few blocks from his mother's house, the one my husband grew up in. The Reagan house was a very simple one with a secret tile in front of the fireplace where he used to hide things as a child. Of course we visited and his mother just raved about how cute Ronnie was and how all the girls had a crush on him when he was a lifeguard.
His mother was glad to have us there. We helped her do many of the things Jimmy, my husband's dad, had done before he died. She had raised two sons and I think I was her chance to have a daughter. She took me with her when she subbed at schools and she arranged for me to attend quite a few coffees and teas, so I could meet her friends. These were informal affairs with a formal twist. The silver coffee and tea sets I had grown up seeing just sitting on sideboards and inside china closets were actually used by all these ladies and everyone seemed to take it for granted that they used the best bone china to go along with it. I felt like I had stepped back in time.
She also took me to Virginia's, a private little boudoir where Virginia herself unlocked the door and invited us in to look at clothing. I got to pick out an beautiful tailored blouse and a skirt with a fitted suede belt that had a silver buckle. I was a bit in awe.
One of her best friends was Bernice, an elegant diabetic woman in her eighties who wore her shiny gray white hair up in a chignon. Bernice and her brother lived together in their old family mansion. It still had a port cochere from the old days when there were carriages and people needed that high porch to step onto. Bernice always made regular cookies when I came, even if she couldn't eat them and she told the most delightful tales. I remember how she impressed me when she hopped up on or off of that port chochere porch because there were no steps. Then I found out she had reroofed her own house and repainted it herself -- just a couple of years earlier. Her brother was an invalid and couldn't really do anything except read. They did a lot of reading because they didn't have a television and she liked to walk to the library summer, winter, spring and fall. I knew right then she was the kind of woman I'd like to be.
All my life I had done certain things to kill time when I was anxiously awaiting something. As a child I made clothespin dolls, embroidered or knitted. Later I made a "Baby Sergeant" doll out of a sock and my husband's old fatigue shirt. I even used one of his sergeant pins on the hat to make it look more official. I paper mached a ketchup bottle and painted it to look like my husband wearing a suit., I read voraciously. I sewed and made dresses or long nightgowns, I painted with my great grandfather's old art box, or I played the piano. Here and now I could only walk my dog, hang out with his mother, or play Bridge with my husband, his mother and his aunt.
He interviewed with the State Farm Home Office Life Company for a position as a Health Underwriter at what used to be called the Grossman Building. It was out near where K-mart was back then and across the street from what would become Eastland Mall, but all I remember being built at that time was Sears. Around noon he came out to the car where I was waiting with our dog. A tall, distinguished, gray haired man he introduced as Jack wanted to take us to lunch. Jack agreed to ride in our car because I had the dog and he insisted on sitting in the back seat. In my nervous rush to clear the floor of Ninna's paraphernalia, I accidentally dumped a gallon of water right on his shoes! I was horrified. I just knew I had ruined everything, but he was such a gentleman. He refused to make a big deal out of it. We went to a place where we could get a nice lunch relatively fast so we could leave Ninna in the car and he could get back to work.
A few days later we got a letter in the mail offering us the job. Now we were house hunting in Bloomington, Illinois.
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