There was a silent strength in the way she poured her evening tea. Her hands moved with a grace that betrayed her age. Her soft smile should have accentuated the folds in her cheeks, but somehow the lines in her face all but disappeared. Her silver hair turned jet black, the weathered wrought iron table turned ivory white, and the sun shone on rolling fields of green grass and blooming flowers. The cool autumn morning faded like a memory. It was spring. It was tea time. A moment forever locked in time for Mrs. Amanda Lewis and anyone who sat with her at the little white table adorned with two chairs. The humble dining set filled the entirety of the small patio outside the back door of her blue wooden house. Most people didn’t know how it happened – how the years melted away or how spring burst forth from any season during tea time with Mrs. Lewis. But she told me once, when I was young.
The table hadn’t always belong to her. It used to be in a park by the old post office who’s elaborately decorated stone exterior now housed three cinema machines.
Many years ago, when the snow had just begun to melt in the first days of spring, Amanda was tasked with delivering eleven letters to the post office for Mr. Scholz, the lawyer. It was her first assignment as his secretary.
As she walked to the post office, the cold from the cobble stoned streets seeped up through the soles of her pointed wooden shoes. The wind bit at her nose. Before she was half way to the post office, she could no longer feel her legs, hands, or face. She had taken interviewed for the secretary position thinking it would be an easy indoor job. But that wouldn’t be the case.
As she neared the post office, she saw movement from corner of her eye. A few men in blue overalls were lifting a white iron table out of a flatbed truck stopped at the edge of the park in the center of the square. Two other tables had already been placed in the park – one under the old beech tree and another facing down the hill towards the train station. She smiled as she walked, watching the men carry the next table to its new home. And just as they stopped to place the table, her right foot came down on a patch of ice. She didn’t feel it, but in a flash the world went from right side up to lying on its side as paper envelopes spun round and round.
“The letters!” she said aloud as they fell onto the melting ice and snow that covered the cobblestone road.
She told me all she could think of was what Mr. Scholz would say if she lost any of the letters or if any of the documents got too wet to send. She didn’t know what kind of man he was back then, and she wouldn’t have been half as worried if it had happened even a few weeks later.
Nonetheless, she panicked, racing to pick up the letters as fast as possible. Three over here. Two by her foot. One on the curb. Within a few seconds she managed to count ten letters grasped tightly under her arm as she looked for the final letter. It appeared to have escaped her.
“I believe this is yours, ma’am,” a voice called from behind. She turned to see an old man, his balding head partially hidden by his cap. A worn and weathered hand extended towards her, holding a single crisp, dry envelop. “Sorry I couldn’t make it fast enough to help you up,” he said, wearing an apologetic smile that longed for days when his body could do what his heart desired.
“Oh, thank you so much,” she said, taking the letter and placing it under her arm, nestled among its ten companions. “I was afraid I had lost this. Thank you so much,” she said one more time, smiling and turning to hurry off to the post office.
She arrived at the post office soon after, clumsily bursting through the doorway. Wisps of icy breath filled the space in front of her as she looked towards the service counter. Three of the four postmen were busy with customers, but one officer stood available, waving to her.
“Good morning, ma’am – are you all right?” he asked from behind a well-groomed mustache. Amanda shot him an icy glare, colder than the ground she fell on.
All right? Mrs. Lewis recalled thinking – she was a woman running errands, not a lost child.
Amanda pulled the letters from under her arm and placed them firmly on the table. She didn’t feel the need to be patronized after the embarrassment of falling down on the street and almost losing her employer’s letters on her first day. Much to her ire, the young man asked about her condition again as he started to sort through the letters.
“I’m perfectly fine, have you never seen a woman deliver a set of envelopes before?” she asked, leaning over the counter.
“Well…” he replied, rubbing the back of his neck and looking to his side. Amanda looked over to see an elderly woman at one counter and another young woman dressed in similar clothes to herself at the next. Her face turned from icy numb to burning hot as she looked down at the counter, unable to meet the young man’s eyes.
And that’s when she saw the red puddles on the counter. And a smear on some of the envelopes. Her heart began to beat wildly as she felt a dull pain in her elbow cut through the numbness of the cold. Reluctantly, she extended her right arm over the counter, and turned it upwards to reveal a tear in her jacket and – she looked away.
Mrs. Lewis said she was sure there had been quite a bit of blood and even a bit of bone, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at her arm until it was fully bandaged. She also kept the bandages on a bit longer than recommended, just in case.
“Oh, goodness, let me take care of that,” the postman said, rushing around the counter. He coaxed her to show him the wound. As he looked over her arm, Amanda kept her eyes locked on the corner of the room where a basket holding umbrellas stood. Between her ragged arm and whatever looks the other customers wore, there wasn’t anything else she wanted to look at.
The postman led her to a bench close to the basket of umbrellas and sat her down. “One moment,” he assured her and rushed off behind the counter and through a doorway. When he returned, he held a roll of bandages and some cotton in one hand and a needle and thread in the other. Amanda felt her heart racing again as she looked at the needle. She had only been stitched together once, when she fell out of a tree at the age of seven. She landed on soft grass – mostly. Her leg hit a rock and tore open on the side just below her knee. A doctor had sewn it back together and all she remembered from that time was being scared and being hurt.
“Here, take this first,” the postman said, producing a canteen from the folds of his vest. She threw back the canteen and probably drank more than the postman intended.
Mrs. Lewis said to this day it was still the worst whiskey she ever tasted. She said it even burned her lips, but she didn’t mind, so long as it helped. And she figured half the bottle would be just enough help.
With a short laugh that could have been mistaken for a grunt, if not for his smile, the postman took his bottle back and set to work. Amanda, unable to look down at her mangled arm, watched the postman’s head bob up and down as he stitched her arm and talked about this and that.
Mrs. Lewis didn’t remember too much of what he said on account of the helpful whiskey, but she did hear him mention being a medic in the war. Probably to help calm her down. But it wasn’t very assuring at the time. Looking back, Mrs. Lewis reflected that the postman did his job better than the doctor from her childhood fall. Later she learned how the postman became so good at mending wounds, but that’s a story for another time.
After the postman finished, he looked up at her with a slight smile. “Good as new,” he assured. “Well, almost. Don’t lift anything for a few days, and keep it out of the cold. And you’ll need… Oh darn it, one minute,” he broke off and ran to the back of the post office again, this time reappearing with a green scarf in hand.
“Stand up,” he commanded, picking Amanda’s coat off the bench. It was an odd tone of voice, and he seemed sense it because he shifted his weight and looked off to the side. Nonetheless Amanda stood and turned her back to the postman as he placed her coat onto her shoulders and helped her right arm find its way through the sleeve. Once the coat was on, he wrapped the scarf around her elbow.
“To keep you warm,” he said.
“But…”
“It’s all right, I’m not giving it to you. You’re borrowing it. Bring it back in three days and you can buy me tea at the café across the seat,” he said smiling sheepishly. “You know, to pay me back.”
Amanda smiled and nodded.
By today’s customs, that might have seemed odd, but back when Mrs. Lewis was young you were always expected to return kindness with additional kindness. It seemed like the best kind of debt to me.
Three days of uninterrupted sunshine later, Amanda returned the favor by buying sandwiches and tea for the two of them at the café. The snow and ice had melted from the cobblestone roads and the air had lost its cruel bite, so they decided to have lunch on the new white iron tables in the park square.
Supposedly the tables were brought in from three towns over by the mayor who wanted to return some beauty to the townspeople’s lives after the war had taken so much.
Mrs. Lewis doesn’t remember everything she and the postman talked about – a side effect of living for so long she said – but she would always remember pouring his tea for the first time. Apparently, he’d never seen anyone pour tea properly in his entire life. And if Mrs. Lewis could muster such magic in each cup she poured now, I can only imagine Amanda doing the same then.
Mrs. Lewis said it’s the simple things that make a moment special. And its moments that make up our lives. So she had always tried to do the simple things as well as she could.
A few months later, they were married and Amanda took the postman’s last name. Through the seasons, Amanda and her postman shared afternoon tea and snacks together on the small white table in the park. In autumn, little meat pies accompanied their tea, and on a few days in winter, soup. No matter what was happening, whether they were in the better or the worse parts of their time together, Amanda and Mr. Lewis met at that table and ate in the park.
After two turns of the seasons, a dark green flatbed truck drove into the square, loaded with young men dressed in military clothes as Amanda and her postman shared their afternoon tea and nervous glances. They finished their lunch and life continued on – except not the same as it had. As rumors of a new conflict spread, the town’s many once-happy faces returned to the grim expressions they wore during the war. Even the postman’s smile seemed to only spread half way across his cheeks.
A few weeks later another truck arrived at the square, mostly empty this time. Mr. Lewis and eight other men from town got on the back of the truck. Mrs. Lewis still remembers feeling helplessly cold and afraid on that bright, warm summer day as the truck drove off, her postman waving gingerly as he disappeared around the corner of the square.
Three months later, the conflict subsided, and the flatbed truck returned to the square carrying eight men. Her postman was not among them. She ran to the front of the truck to check the passenger seat. It was empty.
Mrs. Lewis said she remembers feeling hot and cold and scared and sick and a million things all once. She had asked the driver about Mr. Lewis – and all the driver could do was shake his head as Amanda collapsed against his chest, beating her fists against him as hard as she could.
Mrs. Lewis never told me more than that, and she only shared that much once. Even then, tears streamed down her face. I’d never seen her cry before and have never seen it since.
Amanda continued to eat her lunches on their table in the park every day after that. Mrs. Lewis said it helped her feel connected to him in some way. There was never a grave for her to visit, no final goodbye letter, no last words to cherish. But there was their table and tea time.
Some years later, a newspaper bought the park’s plot of land to put up their office. A small part of the park would remain, but the tables would be gone. For the next few days, Amanda spent most of her time sitting at her postman’s table. Those next few days were almost as hard as losing her postman. Once they took the tables away, it felt like she would be the only part of the postman left in the town, and that thinking of that filled her with an unspeakable sadness.
A few days later, Amanda awoke to the sound of a flatbed truck idling outside of her small house. She lived on the outskirts of town, so it was quite an unusual sound for the morning. Her heart wrenched as she threw a robe over her night gown, tied it hastily, and opened her front door, just a little. At that moment, the old mayor was making his way up Amanda’s front steps with a cane. Her eyes shot to the bed of the truck where her postman’s table and two chairs sat.
Mrs. Lewis said she remembered her heart falling out as she fought back a torrent of tears. She swallowed hard, wiped away a single tear, and opened the door for the mayor. One didn’t cry in front of a guest, after all. And certainly not the mayor.
The mayor apologized profusely for the new construction, and talked of a new park and his compassion for her faithfulness to the postman over the years. As he spoke, two young men carried the white iron table and chairs around to the back of the house and placed them on her porch where they have remained to this day. A new park was built a year later, and Amanda often walked through its winding pathways and sat on the new tables.
But Mrs. Lewis always had afternoon tea on her postman’s table on the humble porch behind her blue wooden house where it was always spring, and she was forever Amanda.
Photo by Lisa Fotios from Pexels