The Serendipity of Research

In the 1990’s when my mother was researching the local library’s microfiche files for old newspaper accounts of doings in her childhood village for a book she and her best friend were putting together…(How’s that for an explanatory phrase?)…I happened on a small newspaper tidbit which I wish I had taken time to print off.

I don’t even know how I happened to see it or where it came from. I don’t recall it being something local. It sticks in my mind that is was from a more easterly state (than Illinois) and I want to say something like the 1860-1880’s time frame.

I will try to give you the gist of the story.

There lived in a village a woman who would have been called in her time a ‘scold’, mean-tempered and mean-worded. No one liked her and they doubted she had ever set foot in a church or had any intentions to so. She was the most obnoxious woman in the village. There also lived a very pious man who one day asked the woman for her hand in marriage, which greatly surprised everyone, and further more, she agreed which doubly surprised the locals. So they were married, but the woman went on much as she had and the husband was quiet, considerate and put up with her behavior.

Finally someone in the village found the nerve to ask the man ‘Why did you ever marry her?’

He explained that he figured that bearing her abuse on earth would garner him a place in heaven.

Word of what he had said got back to the woman whose reply was, and this is what I remember clearly, “I’ll be no man’s pack horse to heaven!” And from that day was a changed woman and a dutiful wife.

Get to heaven on your own merits, buddy!

Isn’t that a story waiting to be written?