Less than 24 hours ago, I was 2,100 miles away from home, dangling on an apple tree (not by accident but by choice) in an orchard outside Milwaukee, Wisconsin. My friend Bunny (a nickname selected with her blessings) and I arrived in style. We came by rail, sitting on straw bales, in what the East Troy Electric Railroad Museum volunteers good-humoredly referred to as "the hobo car" (at $12 a head, seats on this car, I'd say, are more for the hobo wannabes than the real ones).
"During harvest time, this whole area would smell like honey," explained Bunny, her chestnut hair blowing in the Midwestern breeze. "And all the bees would be drunk on fallen apples."
I thought Bunny smelled like honey. Some people laugh as if it were an obligation. Bunny does it as if it were her religion. We met for the first time the night before, but I was already getting drunk on her dimpled smile.
The Genesis of our weekend together began three weeks ago, in Barcelona.
In mid-September, I was working in Spain, living off a suitcase in a hotel by the waterfront. One night, while waiting for the effect of the many cups of cafe solos (which were espresso shots) I'd drank to wear off, I booted up my laptop and signed on to Facebook. Roughly 7,000 miles way, in a different time zone, Bunny came online. So we kept each other company through the chat window.
"Let's play a hypothetical game," I suggested.
"OK," she replied.
"Suppose I come visit you next month, which would be the best weekend to do that?"
"October 11."
When I went to Expedia to check the flights available, I got stuck.
"Is there anything more to this game?" she taunted me, after my long silence.
"I'm looking at flights," I said. "But I can't find your town."
"You need to fly into Milwaukee," she explained.
"Do you realize the danger of this game?" I asked.
"What?" she said.
"At any moment, the game could become real," I told her.
It did.
While riding the Barcelona subway to the Sangrada Familia, the ambitious cathedral designed by Gaudi in his lifetime (1852-1926) and still remains under construction in our lifetime, I decided not to wait and pray for miracles but to make them happen.
"Let's do it," I emailed Bunny. "Let's meet."
"Send me your flight info," she replied, "I'll pick you up."
"Would you carry a sign that says, Cary Grant?" I asked.
"I'll start making the sign," she promptly wrote back.
Fifteen minutes after she picked me up at the airport, we were in her little red car, singing along as we listened to the tracks by Rilo Kiley, Bunny's favorite alternative band. (I'd never heard them before, nor did I know the words to the songs, but nobody in the cornfields by the roadside seemed particularly troubled by my garbled lyrics, so I chimed in, substituting "I'm gone" for what turned out to be "I'm gold.")
And I was your silver lining,
As the story goes;
I was your silver lining,
But now I'm gold.
Hooray, hooray,
I'm your silver lining;
Hooray, hooray,
But now I'm gold.
On the way back from apple picking, we stopped by an old fashioned ice cream parlor by the rail museum. Dressed in bow ties, caps, and rolled-up long sleeves, the waitstaff resembled a cast of characters in a Norman Rockwell sketch for a Saturday Evening Post cover.
"Can I have a dusty road special?" Bunny ordered, "With lots of dust."
Bunny lives in a town with a population of 4,500. On my morning stroll, I discovered the elementary school also serves as the town's administrative site. Once in a while, a trolley would pass by, loaded with wide-eyed children and adults. City slickers riding in the open car would discover (like I did) that ladybugs like to play hide and seek in the passengers' collars and cuffs.
We tried to get tickets to the dinner theater in the town square, but it was a sold-out event, so we decided to visit instead nearby Lake Geneva, eight square miles of freshwater, surrounded by pastel-colored foliage. On the way, we sang along another Rilo Kiley number from Bunny's iPod:
Are we breaking up?
Are we breaking up?
Is there trouble between you and I?
Did my heart break enough?
Did it break enough, this time?
Ooh it feels good to be free;
Ooh it feels good to be free;
Ooh it feels good to be free.
"I don't think I want to be listening to this song when you're dropping me off tonight," I joked.
During the one-hour boat ride across the lake, Bunny pretended the 18,000 sq. ft. stone manor that once belonged to Chicago real estate baron Otto Young was her property.
"There's my house," she said, with a straight face. "The view is great, but cleaning is such a chore."
"Isn't that why you have an army of footmen and servants?" I teased.
"Oh, yeah," she said.
"What's the name of your mansion?" I asked.
Wild Rose Estate was what she came up with. Later, after finding out she had a fear of spiders, I suggested she renamed her pretend mansion Spider Scuttle. She vetoed down my recommendation because even I couldn't say it without tripping on my own tongue.
By the time we'd had dinner, the sun was setting, and the lamps by the shoreline were coming on. At a nearby antique shop, we found a marble statue of Puss in Boots, in a defiant hands-on-the-hip pose that mimics Captain Morgan's famous stance on the rum label. Giggling uncontrollably, we each took pictures of us assuming the same pose.
Before the weekend, Bunny was merely an impression, pieced together from random factoids and photos. Our text chats gave me some clues to her sprightly personality, but I didn't know what she was really like.
What I found out during our time together was that Bunny was no wallflower, no display daisy in a vase. She had faced personal tragedies; had recovered from an illness synonymous with death; had, at the hands of ill-trained medical staff, endured painful procedures that could make a grown man scream. (Under About Me in her Facebook profile, she wrote, "I take a lickin' but keep on tickin'.)
About 30 minutes before midnight, she dropped me off at the inn I was staying at. When we hugged, I didn't want to let go of her, the little bundle of mirth and mettle, the perfect combination of valor and vulnerability wrapped in a soft sweater. But, sooner or later, like every other weekend, this too must come to an end.
At 3 AM on Sunday, I was in an airport shuttle traveling through a lonely highway. Behind me were butter-scented porches, candlelit Halloween pumpkins, children's bicycles leaning against white fences, and brooding barns on gentle slopes--the pastoral life I'd never known I should miss.
On I-43, just beyond Ever Green Drive, I passed rows and rows of moonlit cornstalks, as far as eyes could see. Somewhere in the wind, I heard echoes of Bunny's singing:
And the grass it was a ticking,
And the sun was on the rise,
I never felt so wicked,
As when I willed our love to die.
And I was your silver lining,
As the story goes;
I was your silver lining,
But now I'm gold.
Hooray, hooray,
I'm your silver lining;
Hooray, hooray,
But now I'm gold.
(Image: Me sipping coffee in a cafe by Lake Geneva, photographed by Bunny; and the ticket stub from the ride to the apple orchard.)
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