Windows of the soul
IT HAPPENS WITH MOST OF US at some point, meeting a stranger whose face is familiar, but we don’t know from where or when.
With Sue Wynn Keller, a 98-year-old resident of Forest Springs Health Campus on the eastern outskirts of Jefferson County, the face was that of Doris Rawlings, a 99-year-old resident who lives just down the hall.
“There’s something about her eyes,” Sue told her daughter, Tina. “Every time I see her I think, ‘She’s the only one here that looks familiar to me.’”
Tina was intrigued, and hoped she could help solve the mystery, but wasn’t quite sure where to begin. Then it occurred to her to pick up her mother’s high school yearbook from 1942.
Not long after they began leafing through the class pictures, her mother put her finger on the photo of a girl who had been one grade ahead of her at Shawnee High School in Louisville more than 80 years ago and said, “That’s her!”
Within minutes, Tina and her mother were in Doris’s room, yearbook in hand. Had Doris been a student at Shawnee? Yes, Doris said, she graduated in 1942!
There followed a happy exchange of memories going back to their teenage years.
Sue remembered a family that lived on the street behind the big schoolyard and sold sandwiches to schoolkids across the fence. “We liked to sit on the grass and eat our lunch picnic.”
Doris, the daughter of a military family who had moved often during her school years, recalled how sad she was at having to leave new friends again when graduation came.
Sue, a longtime consumer-member of Meade County RECC, recalled walking 12 blocks to school, and the time she dropped a spool of thread that rolled under the teacher’s desk during a home economics sewing class. When she crawled under the desk to retrieve it, she saw a half pint bottle of whiskey.
Sue and Doris would later retrace the paths their lives had taken between their long ago, brief acquaintance in high school, up to the approach of Sue’s 99th birthday this past December and Doris’ 100th birthday in February.
A curious coincidence of Sue’s early thoughts that there was “something about Doris’ eyes” that looked familiar was the surprising discovery that beside Doris Hufford’s picture in the high school yearbook was one of her favorite quotations: “And, oh! the eye was in itself a soul.”
Another pleasant reunion had awaited Sue after she moved into Forest Springs. Her bedroom window looks out across much of the acreage where Sue, her late husband, Ken Keller, and most of their seven children had lived on a small farm for 25 years.
“It’s good memories,” she says. “I just love to look out there and see trees that I’ve seen for years and years. One of my grandsons used to run out of the house to what he called ‘the climbing tree.’ It’s still there. I’m just glad I’m here.”
