Porchwood Hollow

You don’t have to be extraordinary to be deeply loved.

Before Porchwood knew her as the woman behind the dress-shop windows, Iola Mertyle had already learned that almost anything could become something else in capable hands.
Fabric was never merely fabric. A worn dress might still hold enough good cloth for a child’s Sunday skirt. A beautiful bit of lace could be carefully removed and kept for another bride. Buttons were saved. Ribbons were rolled. Scraps too small for clothing became quilt pieces, doll clothes, patches, or something no one had thought of yet.

Iola wasted very little.
Not because she lacked beautiful things.
Because she understood their value.
She became a master seamstress, and eventually people began coming from well beyond Porchwood to have their wedding dresses made by her. Iola could look at a bolt of cloth and already see the gown hiding inside it.
Her shop occupied the front rooms of an old house near the center of town. There were mannequins in various states of dress, paper patterns folded over chair backs, jars of buttons, baskets of remnants, and always a pincushion somewhere it ought not to have been.

Upstairs were several small rooms she let to travelers. People called it a boarding house.
Iola considered that an unnecessarily grand description for perfectly good rooms nobody was using.

Then there was Doc.
Nobody looking at the physician he eventually became would necessarily have guessed how much of his education had been paid for with a hammer in his hand.
Before medicine, there were houses.
Doc built them. He framed walls, hung doors, repaired roofs, learned which boards could still be used and which truly needed replacing. He kept nails that could be straightened, screws that still had good threads, hinges with years left in them, and pieces of lumber another man might have tossed aside. House by house, job by job, he put himself through medical school.
That history never really left his hands.

Even after people began calling him Doctor, he remained a builder. He could diagnose a stubborn cough and then notice on his way out that the patient’s porch step was loose.
More than once he returned with his medical bag in one hand and a toolbox in the other.
To Doc, the two occupations were perhaps not as different as other people imagined.
Both required you to look carefully.
Find what wasn’t working.Understand why.
Repair what could be repaired, and have enough humility to know when something needed more help than you could give it.

How They Met

Doc was not looking for Iola.
In fact, he was not looking for Porchwood at all.
He was traveling through when his automobile sputtered, coughed, and finally quit in the road not far from Iola’s place.
By the time he had rolled it as far as he could, he found himself outside her house staring into an engine he understood considerably less well than he understood a wall frame.
Iola eventually came outside.
She watched him for a moment.
“You don’t know what’s wrong with it.”
Doc straightened.
“No.”
That, at least, was an answer she respected.
She directed him toward Rowdy’s Garage and later brought him something to drink while he waited.
Rowdy determined fairly quickly that the car needed a part he didn’t have.
It would be morning at the earliest.
Doc settled onto an old stool near the shop door.
The stool wobbled.
He looked at it.
Then at Rowdy.
“Do you have a screwdriver?”
Rowdy handed him one.
Doc fixed the stool.
Then he tightened the loose doorknob.
Then he straightened the bell over the shop entrance.
Rowdy finally said, “You planning to rebuild the whole place while I fix your car?”
Doc looked around.
“No.”
A pause.
“Unless you want me to.”
Rowdy liked him immediately.

Room Three

Iola invited Doc to supper that evening.
She did not invite him to sleep under her roof for free.
There were standards.
Fortunately, Iola had rooms upstairs.
Doc rented Room Three.
The next morning Rowdy fixed the car, Doc paid Iola for the room, thanked them both, and drove away.
Then he came back.
At first, he had excuses.
He wanted Rowdy to check the repair.
He thought he had heard a noise.
He happened to be nearby.
Eventually Rowdy lifted the hood, looked inside for several seconds, then closed it again.
“There is absolutely nothing wrong with this car.”
Doc nodded.
“That’s good.”
“You know that.”
“Yes.”
“And you drove all the way back here anyway.”
“Yes.”
Rowdy looked toward Iola’s house.
Doc said nothing.
After that, Rowdy stopped pretending the automobile had anything to do with it.
Iola did too.
Doc continued renting Room Three whenever he visited, Eventually, when Iola saw him coming up the walk, the key would already be waiting for him.
And eventually, much later, Room Three stopped being necessary.

Mert

Most people called her Iola.
Doc called her Mert.
It came from Mertyle, her middle name, and over time it became something that belonged almost entirely to the two of them.
“Mert, have you seen my—”
“On the workbench.”
“I didn’t say what I was looking for.”
“You were going to.”
Or:
“Mert, you shouldn’t be lifting that.”
“And yet here I am.”
There was affection in the name, but also familiarity, the sort that only develops when two people have known one another long enough to recognize the beginning of the other’s sentences.

Their House

Their life together was filled with things other people might have called ordinary.
Work.
Meals.
Repairs.
Bills.
Fabric.
Patients.
Wood shavings.
Buttons.
There were no trumpets announcing the important moments.
Doc built things.
Iola made things.
And both of them saved things.
A bent nail might be straightened.
A length of lace might find its way onto another bride twenty years later.
A scrap of good oak was still good oak.
A torn dress was not necessarily finished being a dress.
They knew the difference between used and useless, and perhaps that was one of the reasons they understood one another so well.

What Porchwood Learned From Them:

Iola taught Porchwood that making something beautiful did not require beginning with something new.
Doc taught Porchwood that a strong structure could be made one board at a time.
Together they taught something else entirely.
A meaningful life did not have to be spectacular.
You could build houses.
Sew wedding dresses.
Care for sick people.
Save screws in coffee tins.
Keep a box of ribbon scraps because surely somebody would need them someday.
Make supper.
Fix the gate.
Sit beside the same person year after year.
And somewhere in all those very ordinary things, build something enormous.
A life.
A home.
A family.
A love that survived because it was tended rather than displayed.
And so the words beneath their place in Porchwood became:

You don’t have to be extraordinary to be deeply loved.

Although anyone who knew Iola and Doc might quietly argue that there had been something rather extraordinary about them after all.