A Heroine for Young Eyes

Thank you Colleen for sharing this story about a woman you looked up to and admired. This story is so beautifully written.

Amy

A Heroine for Young Eyes
By Colleen

I can't remember how my mother became friends with Deanne. Our family was from a very rural area in southern Ohio and we would always pass her farm when we were going to town for groceries. Our homestead, as I like to call it, was where I learned that work, especially work done for the joyous benefit of my mother, was the equivalent of gold. To both my brother and I it would come to mean fast money and an extra night out while in high school, but when we were young, all we wanted was the
reward of going to Deanne's house to see her abnormal edition to the community--her buffalo. She was, the only woman within 600 miles who owned the environmentally and culturally estranged creatures. Rural Ohio being what it is--hilly, but yet dryly uneventful, buffalo were to me as an unexpected paycheck is to me now.

Deanne was tall blonde with a long chin and a wide set grin--of which she didn't often show all of her teeth through unless she was tossing her head back in a fit of laughter. Strangely, that same tugging grin remained stable and unwavering in the afternoon summer sunshine when she'd hire me out to clean her house and listen to the Soft Rock station Warm 98.5 out of Cincinnati.

Her husband had gone, along with the buffalo. The house had quickly become more than what she could keep up with. The chemotherapy for her stage rising breast cancer was also to blame.

My mom was the kind of woman that would answer any of my questions. Periods, birthing, boys, “manhood,” tampons, why to ALWAYS knock before coming in her and daddy’s bedroom…the works. But mom never told me much about Deanne's treatments, how she was feeling or if she was able to feel at all. I would just go over to her house when she wanted me—for cleaning, for her sun dried iced tea and to walk through the tall white barn with a surreal vision of bison standing outside its corners. This
woman, this serge of joy, was a light of a whole other dimension in both mine and my brother’s life. That dimension was a dimension of comedy, of jokes and bear hugs and everything that encompassed her.

Deanne came to visit us one day in our home. She came with only one
breast, not the normal two.I remember being so taken back, shocked and embarrassed. My young mind thought how can she stand to see herself so exposed? I tried not to
stare. There she sat in front of my family, forgetting that a piece of her was missing—as a petal, plucked and stolen away. There in our home…in front of my family she sat.

But she didn’t just sit. She was Deanne. She jokingly smacked her leg and threatened my brother’s bad health if he drank too much Mt. Dew. She was her. Fervent in light and life and more of a woman to me than any other I have seen, she was holding more dignity in a one breasted body than some people will with implants. She was the essence of heroine not through glitz, glamour or fame but through the love she was sharing and the light she saw in herself and was transferring to my family.

Since then my materialistic thriving culture has tried to replace my idea of heroine. They never will succeed. It took a woman to understand her own beauty to help me also appreciate mine.