Synchronicity - Connecting the Dots at the Farmers Market

Last summer, I shared volunteer duties with Matt a first-time volunteer in the Welcome Tent at the Morton Grove Farmers Market. It took about two minutes to orient him to the papers on the table, the crowd counter, the weekly drawing (don’t say raffle because no money or gambling is involved), the cherry red, covered Radio Flyer wagons available as long as a parent leaves a driver’s license, and the hidden spotted cow… ring the bell when a child finds it, give them a section of stickers and tell them to go hide it for some other child. Matt, a government worker was a quick study.

A few people came by and interacted on each of those responsibilities…  most wanted to win the drawing for the bag of samples from the market. One woman whose hair was “done” and the color of pale carrot juice approached the table and pointed with an gnarled finger at a brochure with a picture of the “eight wonders of the world”… the wonders of Morton Grove that is. It got her talking. “You know that corner of Nashville and Beckwith with the tree with the limb that the Indians used to point the way to their grounds? It was hit by lightning.”

I told her, I stopped on a bike ride a few weeks before and took a photo of it after I read the plaque that memorialized it. She told us that she first saw it when she moved from Rhinelander, Wisconsin to Morton Grove sixty-two years fresh from nursing school. In the years since, she held the position of the Morton Grove Health Department nurse, a position, she told us, no longer exists. Something clicked… dots began to connect as we conversed.  I asked, “By any chance would does the name Courts from Eagle River/ mean anything to you?”

“Why, yes,“ she said. “She was a nurse… Lou Courts…. older than me”  

“That’s her,” I told her. “After she retired, she’d visit my next door neighbor in Michigan, her niece, in the winters when Rhinelander had seven feet of snow and she couldn’t easily get out.”

After a little more chit chat, the woman with the carrot juice hair went off to shop. Just as she turned to move on to the fruit farmer, she turned and told us she was now ninety-two. Matt and I looked at each other… disbelieving. Ninety two. Both of us thought seventyfive maybe – not nineties. But considering Aunt Lou’s age, it had to be true. I loved the connected dots. And, I want to be that 92.