All the people I knew, all the people I saw on TV, everyone came from loving homes, everyone's parents stayed together. Widowhood might occur, but divorce? That was something only whispered about, but never fully understood.
My parents exemplified this. The quintessential married couple, a farmer and his wife, knocking out kids at fairly regular two-year intervals, facing down whatever problems came their way with pluck and good humor.
So it seemed.
Dad sprang from fairly hardscrabble circumstances, the product of Swedish coalminers, isolated from the wonders and ways of the larger world. With only an eight-grade education, he sought employment at an early age, and his life may have gone in an entirely different direction, except...
He found himself in Europe during World War II, working in the motor pool. What a change that must have been! His whole life had been lived within the range of a few miles, he had no idea what the rest of the world looked like, and now here among the splendors of the Old World, he confronted death on a daily basis. His division somehow wound up with clean-up duty at Dachau, and this vision of ultimate, incomprehensible horror surely numbed his senses.
He came home with no ceremony, and no counseling to help him process what he'd witnessed, and worked and saved, and tried to bury the memories, determined to lead a simple life.
But though the girl he married willingly became part of his life, she was smart and well-read, with a curiosity about the world beyond the little bit of it she'd seen. She'd get no help in that regard from her husband; he'd been there, he'd seen too much already, and never wanted to go back.
So Mom stayed home, helped on the farm, slopped the hogs, beheaded chickens, raised the kids, all the things expected of her. She drove into town once a week to buy groceries, chatted endlessly with the neighbors, built her days around her soap operas.
And again, she did this willingly, with no complaints. Mostly. Although many years later she'd admit sometimes, when the kids were in school and isolation overwhelmed her, she'd stare out at the sun-dappled trees lining the lane and think about getting in the car and driving off a bridge, ending her life just to relieve the boredom.
All this, of course, I found out later. As a kid, Mom and Dad seemed as perfect as Ward and June Cleaver, albeit without the suits and pearls. I knew nothing of any serpents lurking in the garden. Life could not have been better.
Could it?
