The Apparition of Cooper's Mills 

The rain fell gently from an overcast sky.  The cooler air, after a long spell of summer heat was a gift; a mid-summer treat, an ice cream cone from the heavens.    I was a boy of 16 years and the damp cool tasted delicious on my skin.   I had ambled keys in hand, without a serious care in the world, half way across the street from my parent’s car.  The car was a big pink boat of a Detroit made Mercury, a gas guzzling family behemoth.  That’s when I saw her.  Between me and the barber pole stood a pretty young girl, slight of build, which I was certain to this day, I had never seen before, or sense.  She smiled brightly as I passed near her on my way for a haircut.  Her face, her smile, her eyes danced in a near supernatural radiance.  She couldn’t have been more than 14 years old, far too young for a fellow with a new driver’s license to chance a second glance.

Then she spoke to me.  She said only two words, and those two words have perplexed me and left me in wonder for the past 50 years, when on occasion my mind indulges in the flights of fancy to the carefree years of my youth. 

She greeted me with my name, “Hi Shep”, just a casual hello from a pretty young girl.  I took a few more steps toward the old wooden sidewalk, stepped through the thresh hold of the barber shop and turned to ask her name.  She was gone, into the afternoon rain.  I inquired about her of the friendly old barber with his round belly and no tails to his un-tucked shirt.  He answered in the clipped New England accent that I could barely imitate and he said, “Ayah, I never noticed her in the first place, and as far as I know, all of the children in the neighborhood have grown up and left the village.” Before I left the tinny two block long settlement, I asked an old women wearing a broad brimmed hat and holding a garden trowel, then a young boy about the girls age who the young girl might be.  No one knew her, which was really quite odd given the size of the town.  I came back the next day and inquired of several more people.  There was not a trace.  I never saw her again. Oh, I have looked for her many times.  Over the years I have detoured well off the beaten path back to the tiny village of Cooper’s Mills, Maine.  Well into my twenties, and even my early thirties, I was sure that I would recognize her on seeing her again.  But I never saw her.

 She lives in my heart, a lovely apparition, born in an instant of time, yet woven into the fabric of my mind for as long as I shall live.  Her face is only a vague recollection, a faded Daguerreotype wrapped gently in lace, and laid carefully away in the old attic trunk with other keepsakes from a bygone era. 

Then one night shortly after my 50^th birthday, the mystery was solved.  First I should tell you that I often find myself alone with only my thoughts and my Siamese cat.  My wife is gone, the children raised and scattered.  The television has become an incessant bore, and my social life, while adequate, is not compulsive.   The changes in my life have come upon me recently and have left time and energy to explore new avenues.   Very late one recent evening, well past midnight I drifted into a meditative state, a centering prayer.  Without conscious direction I suddenly found myself in the tiny village.  At first I saw only the chrome door handle on a background of Mercury pink.  My eyes downcast, as I walked from the car, fell on the wet gravel road.  My field of vision widened slightly to encompass a lush but poorly manicured lawn with islands of bright daisies.  I looked up, “where am I?”  Tall oaks and huge maples were an umbrella against the rain and the cool dampness felt good on my skin, roughened by years of the dry climate on the Colorado Plateau.  There she was, unchanged by time, standing in front of the barbershop.  I approached her, still unsure of what to say, even after 50 years.  I said, “hello.”  She didn’t see or hear me.  An overwhelming rush of emotion came on me and my skin covered with goose bumps that lasted longer than I had ever before experienced, and then I knew she was Linda Duncan, who had never been east of Denver until she was well into her twenties when I took Linda Duncan, my new bride, to Cooper’s Mills for the first time in her life.  I was just 26 and Linda was 24. 

On that day when we were still young,seemingly as long ago as my first encounter with the lovely apparition, we drove into the tiny village one rainy afternoon and parked the car across from the spot the barbershop had once stood.  Even as a happy newlywed, I wistfully hoped to see the pretty girl once more, never dreaming that pretty young girl had become my wife.  The fabric of time has woven us inexorably into the same magical tapestry.

My heart is like a singing bird

Whose nest is in a watered shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

Because my love is come to me. 

Christina Rossetti  1830-1894