Mrs. Watson was the former college nurse. By the time I knew her, she was an AC icon who was a figurehead for escapism by the AC elite.
I tended her gardens for her, growing beans, racking out rocks, and weeding the greenhouse tomatoes which we sweet and impossible not to steal. I smoked her Benson and Hedges. I burned her dead leaves. I stoked the coal in her wood-burning fireplace. I poured her brandy and cut her cakes. Mrs. Watson didn't need the help. We -- the 6 or 7 of us who frequented the place -- needed to help her. In return we received her caustic wit and firey debates on what's indeed not proper about kids and culture these days. We loved each other all the more in spite of it. Then we'd watch "Neighbors" on the telly and forget taking ourselves seriously at all.
When I'd heard that Mrs. Watson had died, I remembered something she used to say during any given conversation. "It takes all types to make a world." Indeed. When she died, I wondered who has just been born to take her place as the archetype madame of a harem of lost prep schoolers too far from home to know they missed it.
