Willow Leaves August 23

Wedding! Reception! France! The wedding of Janice Thompson and Whisper Townsend was celebrated at 2:00 yesterday afternoon with an estimated attendance of over 500, as most of the town of Willow Mills turned out at the 4H Park Pavillion to celebrate the nuptials. The bride, resplendent in her grandmother’s wedding dress, arrived in a fringed surrey pulled by two dapple gray draft horses and driven by long-time friend Tom Fergusson. She was attended by her 14-year-old sister, Amanda, as maid of honor. The groom wore dove gray tails and a black T-shirt. Best man, Lee Bergman, a college-friend of Whisper’s escorted the maid of honor. The ceremony was officiated by “The Herb Lady,” Donna Jones, who took a break from a 10-day seminar with the Dali Lama in Bloomington this week to conduct the ceremony. The bride and groom exchanged vows in French, a language they have both studied since junior high, and which they have used for their private language, being the only ones in their families who speak French. That should have been a give-away for what was to come, but the couple caught everyone by surprise with their wedding conclusion. Just before the couple returned to the carriage to be driven to the reception, Whisper took the microphone and made the surprise announcement that they will be leaving for Paris in two weeks. The couple further announced that they would be spending at least a year there as students at the American University in Paris. As details were revealed during the course of the reception, we discovered the couple have been working on this for a year in secret, and received notice in June that they had been accepted on an experimental exchange program. Both will be studying theater with some classes conducted by the world-famous Commedie Francais. The couple have promised to keep in touch with everyone here in Willow Mills through periodic updates in the Willow Leaves.

Adelaide and Lyle Kitchener

People think of Willow Mills as a “churchy” kind of town. Not so, say many of its residents. At least not more than is normal in Indiana. Folks are usually quick to tell the story of Adelaide and Lyle Kitchener who used to live right where Market Street runs into a cornfield on the west side of town.

Some years ago the service was interrupted out at the Methodist Church during the last hymn one Sunday by Adelaide bursting through the back door and marching straight up to the pulpit. As the hymn ended she stated loudly, “My husband is dying and wants to be baptized. Will you do it?”

Rev. Larson answered that if she would wait till they had the benediction and if he was alive and wanting baptism, he would do it. Adelaide stood beside him with her arms folded defiantly while he finished the service, tapped her foot impatiently as he greeted a few people on the way to the door, and then latched onto his arm and marched him to her car and drove off.

Adelaide and Lyle were hard livers and seeing her walk into any church was a surprise. Her favorite saying, over a bottle of beer at the Dowsing Rod was, “I go to the round church where the devil can’t corner me.” To literal thinking Hoosiers, that was a puzzlement because the only round building near here is Albert Bailey’s round barn where his prize bull…. That’s another story.

When the Reverend got to the Kitchener’s house, Lyle was still alive, but not doing well. He had a bad liver and a few months earlier he’d been diagnosed with lung cancer. After unsuccessful treatments, Adelaide brought him home to die.

This morning it looked like the end was near. Rev. Larson approached the bed and asked if Lyle recognized him and could understand what he was saying. Lyle said yes, he could. Then the preacher said he had some questions to ask Lyle. Adelaide broke in at this point and said Lyle couldn’t answer a lot of questions, just pour the water on him and be done. But Rev. Larson persisted with the whole ritual.

Do you want to be baptized? Repent of your sins? Believe in Jesus? Promise to be a faithful disciple? etc. To each question, Lyle answered yes. At last Rev. Larson sprinkled the water on his head and spoke a benediction and a prayer. As soon as he had finished, Adelaide rushed him from the room, pushed a $20 bill into his pocket in thanks, and pushed him out the door.

Well, sometimes the unexplainable happens. Lyle didn’t die that day. Nor that week. Nor anytime that year. By summer he began gaining strength, and that fall the UMC congregation got its second shock of the year when Lyle showed up in church, alone, and sat through the whole service. His health continued to improve and late in the year his doctors agreed that his cancer had faded and he was in remission.

Lyle attended the Methodist Church for the better part of eight years before he died in an auto accident while on vacation in Arizona. Adelaide never really forgave him for recovering in the first place, so his death was not as mourned by her as you would think.

She held that Lyle had been cornered and tricked into making a bad deal. That he’d lived his life so purely those last eight years that it couldn’t have been much fun. And that she’d be dead and buried before she was seen in a church again.

Which, indeed she was. She passed away quietly in her home a few years ago, sitting in her chair on the porch with a glass of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She was 96 years old.