Mr. Bill

The house I've grown up in sits at the very end of a gravel road.  The road is small and doesn't have many houses, and all of the neighbors are old people.  I love this charming essence of my little road.  You would think that since we didn't live in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, there were never other kids for my siblings and I to go outside and play with like most people had.  My childhood was actually quite the opposite.  We were so spoiled by the elderly couples that lived around us.  At the top of the hill lived Miss Betty and Mr. Bill.  It was just the two of them, as their children had grown and moved, so they took my siblings and I on as their next project.  Miss Betty had an especially soft spot in her heart for us kids because her dad had actually built our house and she had grown up there.  Any time that it snowed they would call the house and ask my mom if they could take us sledding.  Any time they went out of the boat (we all lived on the lake) they would swing by our dock and offer us a ride because they knew we'd be out there.  They had the best driveway for bike riding and I'm sure we made ourselves a little bit too welcome to it, not to mention the diving board and water slide too... Miss Betty would make invitations and deliver them to our house for tea parties for my sister and I.  We would ride our bikes up the hill and she would dress us up in her old dresses and jewelry even though they swallowed us whole and then we would play games and try to act fancy as Mr. Bill served us something delicious that was definitely not tea.  Aside from how good they were to us, they we even better to the community.  Mr. Bill was the second volunteer ever in Charlotte for Habitat for Humanity.  At least once a week you could look out the window and see Miss Betty swimming around the cover holding a bag of tomatoes in the air to deliver to the people who lived across the way.  (Mind you, she was AT LEAST 70 at this point.)  Years ago they moved out of their home on our little road and into a house in a retirement community because Mr. Bill hadn't been doing so well.  Their great nephew and his wife moved into the house where they have started a family.  Last week I got a call from my mom who had the news of Mr. Bill's passing.  On Saturday I went home to go to his funeral.  It was a beautiful service and the family seemed in as good of spirits as possible.  At the end, Miss Betty and her two sons lined up for everyone to walk past and hug or give words of encouragement.  When we walked by she still gave us the biggest hugs and we briefly reminisced how much fun we had and I made sure to remind her just how huge she and Mr. Bill had been to my childhood.  I can't imagine being married to someone for 65 years and then losing them, but somehow this incredible woman still managed to do it in the most elegant and precious way.