Reflections on the Thirteenth Week of Fall – Jane and Charlie

Trees and North Side of Log House

    My romance with Jane Austen began thirty-seven years ago. I’d watched the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice mini series and fell deeply, madly in love with Jane. After reading, listening, and watching everything Jane Austen, my passion demanded more. I celebrated Jane’s birthdays by throwing a tea party for Ruffing Montessori School colleagues after work on numerous December sixteenths.

    The night before the first tea in December 1991, my son Charlie, seventeen years old at the time, walked into the dining room of our Cleveland Heights house and watched me select delicate tea cups from the china cabinet. I wrapped the cups in paper towels and tucked them into a sturdy box between tea pots wrapped in tablecloths.

    “You know, Mom,” Charlie reached for an oatmeal raisin cookie from the canister waiting to be packed. “Not everyone likes Jane Austen as much as you.”

    I tossed packages of Earl Gray and peppermint tea into a second box. “I know.”

    “So it’s possible no one will come to your tea party.” He bit into the cookie.

    I placed a loaf of zucchini bread next to the tea packages and put the lid on the cookie canister. “I don’t expect a crowd, but a few teachers will come.”

    “Well, don’t be surprised if no one does.” He left me to my packing.

    After school, four teachers sat in third-grade-size chairs around the two by three foot table in my cramped tutoring room. We sipped tea and listened to Denise, the art teacher with frizzy hair and purposely unmatched socks. She told an antidote about youngsters’ painting shenanigans.

    Halfway through her story, Charlie peaked around the door frame. He glanced about the room, nodded to me, and left without saying a word. He’d walked a mile and a half from the high school just to be sure I had company for the Jane Austen tea. My mothering heart swelled, and I missed the punchline of Denise’s story.

    Years passed. I moved the birthday teas to the staff room then to a classroom because attendance increased. After joining the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), I also celebrated Jane’s birthday with Janeites.

      *Toasting Jane with carbonated grape juice,

      *Dancing country dances until my heels ached,

      *Listening to music Jane would have played on her pianoforte,

      *Writing letters using a quill pen, and

      *Contributing Wells Wood holly and rosemary decorations for an afternoon of table games.

    After Spence and I retired to northwest Pennsylvania, driving back to Cleveland for celebrations turned into a physical ordeal. I flirted with the idea of asking Spence to drink tea in honor of Jane. Visualizing Spence off his tractor, out of his garden, and away from his computer to sip tea didn’t work. Instead, I noted December 16 in my journal and thought Jane Austen thoughts without throwing or attending a party.

    But this year, Janeites around the world celebrated Jane Austen two hundred years after her death. I wanted to celebrate Jane’s birthday with more than a journal notation. And since Charlie, at age forty-three, had invited me to a tea party for two this summer (See “Tea Party for Two” September 3, 2017 blog), I could invite him.

    When Charlie called to chat a week and a half ago, I asked, “Will you have to work Saturday, the sixteenth?”

    “Yes,” his exhausted voice answered. “We’ve been loading twenty-six cars a day and working six days a week.”

    “That’s too bad.” Twenty-six cars is UPS-speak for twenty-six delivery trucks. Charlie usually supervised the loading of sixteen or seventeen cars a day. He’d be exhausted that Saturday. “You’ll need to go home and sleep after work.”

    Charlie said, “Why did you ask?”

    “It’s Jane’s two hundred forty-second birthday. I was going to invite you to a tea party, but not now. You’ll be too exhausted.”

    I hung up the phone and planned a celebration for one.

    On Saturday, December 16, I dressed in a Jane Austen t-shirt and studied Karen Gloeggler’s Jane Austen Quilts Inspired by her Novels for the next step in making the cross in a cross blocks of the Mansfield Park quilt pattern. Then I sat in my Adirondack chair and swiped my finger across the tablet screen so I could listen to LibriVox’s audio version of The Letters of Jane Austen while I sewed.

    The front door opened.

    Charlie trudged into the great room. His upper back humped forward, and a laundry bag half his size draped over his shoulder. He set a bag of loose lemon soufflé tea on the arm of my chair.

    “Ooooo. Thanks!” I opened the bag and took a whiff. “The tea smells like vanilla.”

    “It should smell like lemon,” he mumbled and dragged himself to the washing machine.

    I dashed to the kitchen to bake a batch of sugar molasses cookies. While I brewed a pot of the lemon soufflé tea, I set the table with two Jane Austen mugs and cookies cooling on a rack.

    Charlie shuffled back to the kitchen and collapsed into a chair.

    I poured tea and handed him a mug.

    He clutched the mug and bent his head as if to inhale the rising steam.

    I took a sip. Though the ingredients didn’t list vanilla, the taste of vanilla tinged with lemon filled my mouth. I bit into a sweet molasses cookie. “We could share our favorite Jane Austen quotes.”

    He grunted a consent.

    “Mine goes something like ‘We live to laugh at our neighbors and have them laugh at us in return.’” I took another bite. “Maybe it’s ‘make sport of our neighbors.’”

    He looked up and pointed to the mug he’d given me for my birthday. “There are quotes on your mug.”

    Indeed.

    I turned my mug and called out the novel for each quote I read to Charlie until I came Mr. Bennet’s from Pride and Prejudice. “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and to laugh at them in our turn?” I laughed and took a second cookie.

    Head still bent, Charlie sipped tea.

    While I summarized past Jane Austen birthday celebrations, Charlie didn’t utter a word. Had he fallen asleep? I stood, rubbed his arm, and said, “Thanks for coming to celebrate with me. You’re special.”

    Leaving his empty mug on the table, Charlie picked up a cookie, shuffled to his room, and closed the door. Within a minute, snores floated down the hall.

    I climbed the spiral stairs with my tablet, listened to Jane Austen’s letters, and sewed center sections for the cross in a cross blocks.

    My passion for Jane Austen pales in comparison to the natural love Charlie gives me.

 

Center of "Cross in a Cross" Block