Bill, the Lillie of the Valley

Bill was a tiny spitfire of a woman.

She never much cared for her given name, Lillie, so she went by “Bill.”  However, my brother and I  always called her "Mrs. Watson."  Even our parents did.  It confused us greatly when Mrs. Watson signed her first Christmas card to my family with “Bill."  Back in 1978, at least, seeing “J.C. and Bill Watson” on a Christmas card seemed so odd.

J.C. was her husband, a taller, portly man who always wore a black suit and a white shirt.  Back in the day, he and his brother owned a small chain of department stores across a few then-small towns between Fort Worth and Dallas, at a time when “main streets” really were main streets, and townspeople did all their shopping along them.

Mr. and Mrs. Watson made for a study in contrasts – with him taller and stocky, and Bill so short – incredibly short – and petite.  And their personalities didn't seem terribly similar, either.  He was quiet and unassuming; she was not loud either, but she talked more, and had definite ideas about things, and knew how to advance those ideas firmly yet graciously.

She was always a traditionalist, while at the same time, she could defy convention.  She personally designed their beautiful yet unpretentious home, and acted as general contractor during its construction, which was indeed an unusual thing for a woman in the 1960's, in provincial Texas.  Her design is simple and elegant - a long, low-slung one-story home, based on the type of farmhouses that were typical of her growing-up years in far south Texas.  Her parents had owned fertile acreage in what Texans call "the Valley," near Texas' southernmost border with Mexico, a region particularly famous for its ruby-red grapefruit.  She incorporated a full-length covered porch on the front, and another long porch on the back, all with Saltillo tile flooring she'd personally selected from a tile factory in Mexico.  The tan-colored hand-made bricks sheathing her home she'd also selected in Mexico.

The Watson house; image from Google Maps

It's a theme you'll notice often in Bill's life:  her love of hand-crafted things.  Their intrinsic uniqueness seemed to speak to her.

She installed hand-made front doors from Spain, and while their wood is beautifully fashioned in a classic Spanish style, she'd specified the wood to be of a particular variety.  A variety that, even today, has some sort of wormy, gooey fungus that, from time to time, oozes out of the wood.  It's as gross as it sounds, and the first time I saw it, I feared Mrs. Watson's doors were woefully flawed. 

"Mrs. Watson!" I remember exclaiming, "You have puss oozing from your doors!"  It looked like a case of really bad acne.  Oh, it was so gross.

Yet the ever-proper Mrs. Watson was mostly surprised that I was unfamiliar with this species of wood (I can't remember what she called it; I researched it for this essay, but can't find anything like it on the Internet).  Apparently, she'd chosen it because it helps to keep the wood moist, which is technically a feature to accommodate Texas' often-arid summers.

The more I've thought about it, her front entry doors contribute a great deal to understanding Bill Watson's character. On the one hand, viewed from the street, they look attractive, but not particularly exceptional. Yet upon closer inspection, they were obviously constructed with extraordinary craftsmanship, each piece of wood still solidly in place, as if straight out of an old-world carpenter's shop.  And they possess that secret, intrinsic ability to provide for their own maintenance; a quality even a botanist friend of mine was entirely unfamiliar with when I asked for her input.

Once behind these doors, those pink-hued Saltillo tile floors extend throughout the home's main rooms.  So although Mrs. Watson had plush Aubusson rugs on her floors, sounds do tend to echo a bit.  And her crisp voice tended to predominate in those echoes, while her husband’s was far more muted.  Not that she ever yelled, of course.  Bill was a genteel Southern lady, with a lilting laugh and a poised diction that disguised her humble roots from “the Valley.”

Almost certainly, it was those humble roots, during the Great Depression, with little money available for travel, and little opportunity for cultural enrichment beyond "the Valley's" Tex-Mex pluralism, that helped push Bill towards something different.  Something beyond the miles and miles of fields and placid agriculture in which the inquisitive and gregarious little woman had grown up.  After graduating from high school, Bill went on to college, which was a rarity for women in those days.  She ventured into office work for large oil companies in New Orleans and Los Angeles, and joined the foreign service to help with America's rebuilding of Japan after World War II.

In photos from her time in Tokyo, Bill looks exceedingly comfortable, especially for a small-town Texas farm girl, in the cosmopolitan culture of a capitol city, in a country that had been a bitter enemy of the United States just a few years earlier.  Her incredibly short stature helped her fit in physically with the Japanese.  She loved the propriety of their culture, the proud nature of the people, and their fastidious industriousness.  Their wartime allegiances aside, the Japanese were just like her.  Which, for Bill, seemed to affirm not only the similarities that can be found across humanity, but also her own enthusiasm for her country, since the United States was participating in a vast humanitarian exercise to rehabilitate a nation it had just defeated.  There was a virtue in America's civilized response to victory that energized Bill's patriotism, and continued throughout the rest of her storied life.

I’m actually fairly uncomfortable referring to her as “Bill,” since when I met her, I was 13; an age at which I was expected to politely refrain from calling my elders by their first names.   She was Mrs. Watson to me then, and she’s Mrs. Watson to me now.

My brother met her first, shortly after we’d moved to Arlington, Texas, from upstate New York.  He’d been riding his bike around our new neighborhood, and Mrs. Watson had been in her front yard, tending to her immaculate landscaping.  She saw a young boy riding down the street – the Watson’s lived at the top of a hill, which was a fun spot for young bike riders, as you might imagine – but she didn’t recognize him, since we were brand-new to the neighborhood.  And being an outgoing person, she introduced herself.  And my brother came home, remarking on how friendly one of our new neighbors was… and about how fun that hill was in front of her house.

She was in her mid-sixties by then, her husband’s business was slowing down thanks to America’s newfound preoccupation with regional shopping malls, and she was about to become a grandmother for the first time.  Much of her days was spent on what had become her favorite hobby - her yard.  She used to have turf grass as her lawn, the type you see on golf courses, and she owned a lawnmower specifically designed to cut it.  She clipped the edges of her lawn as precisely as any groundskeeper at any prestigious country club would, and she kept her shrubs trimmed to within an inch of their lives.  It wasn’t until she developed skin cancer from being outside so much – despite always wearing a huge, floppy hat – that she finally hired a yard crew… which she supervised like a mother hen.

And the stories she’d tell, as she'd take breaks in her yard chores!  At first, I struggled to understand why a young woman would go to Japan to work so enthusiastically in a nation we’d just defeated in war.  I’ve never liked traveling, and foreign cultures are… well, foreign to me!  But Mrs. Watson would almost glow, regaling me with anecdotes of her time in Japan… or about the time when she wanted to see the Caribbean, and somehow ended up as the only paying passenger on a freighter sailing to Barbados.

Not that she was a loose woman by any means – she was utterly moral.  She wasn’t exactly the type of woman who’d risk her virtue by sailing on a ship populated only by burly men.  Yet she ended up subduing those mariners and earning their respect at a time in history when women typically weren’t widely successful in that regard.

Her son-in-law reminisced with me recently about how she used to drive - well, "fly" would be a more accurate term!  She drove like a bat-outta-you-know-where, and she always drove silver luxury cars.  We could have called her a silver bullet, I guess.  And she was so short, in a couple of the cars she drove, they had to pay to have the driver’s seat removed from its factory-installed track, and re-bolted into place even closer to the steering wheel, so she could see over the dashboard to pilot her cruiser.  Her husband couldn’t drive her cars, because he was so much bigger than she, and the seat couldn’t be moved to accommodate anybody else but her.

I’ve never enjoyed driving into Dallas, which is about half an hour away from us, but Mrs. Watson treated Big D like it was her backyard.  She had friends from around the world, thanks to her many travels. She also enjoyed maps, and would study up on places she was planning to visit in such detail that one time, after flying into a city she’d never been to before, she accurately instructed her cab driver on how to get to her hotel.

Over the years, she stayed abreast of many details related to her husband’s business, and after he died, when their store in Arlington was finally shuttered and the property sold, she was indignant at its selling price.

“J.C. purposely built that store with a reinforced sub-basement and elevator shaft that could support several additional stories, so it could be re-purposed into an office building,” she sputtered to me.  “From day one, he knew that building probably wouldn’t always be a department store.”  And Mr. Watson was correct.  Today, it’s an office building for the University of Texas at Arlington.

Over the years, Mrs. Watson’s health would have its ups and downs, but the only reason we ever knew she had skin cancer came when she hired that outside crew to begin doing her landscaping.  She never complained about her health, except when her failing eyesight kept her from enjoying television and reading.  Eventually, those prized Saltillo tile floors came back to haunt her, when she fell on them more than once, but even then, she kept her stints in the hospital shrouded in secrecy.  Not because she was afraid of getting older, but because she didn’t want to burden other people with her problems.  She knew how fortunate she’d been in her life, and she knew that other people had things far worse than she did.

I did know about one of her surgeries, but not from Mrs. Watson herself.  Her beloved daughter told me – or, at least, told me when Mrs. Watson was due back home from the hospital!  The next day, as I was on my usual evening walk, before the sun set, I went by Mrs. Watson’s house, and down that hill into the cul-de-sac, and I saw her daughter leave in her own silver Cadillac.

I didn’t think anything of it until I began to hear some rustling and banging going on in the toolshed attached to Mrs. Watson's backyard carport.

“Who would have the audacity to break into Mrs. Watson’s toolshed at this hour, with the sun still out, and her daughter having just left?” I wondered as I rounded the cul-de-sac.  The odd noises continued, so when I reached her driveway on my way back up the hill, I simply strode down it to the end of her driveway, where her carport and toolshed were.  And through the open door of the toolshed, I saw Mrs. Watson, not yet a full day home from the hospital, in her housedress, fussing with that cumbersome turf grass mower of hers.

She looked up and saw me coming.  And with a stiff index finger pointed swiftly at me, she sternly ordered, “Don’t tell my daughter!  She thinks I’ve gone to bed.”

Instead, Mrs. Watson had been hoping her daughter would leave while it was still daylight, so she could fiddle with that turf mower, an apparently cantankerous machine that she didn’t entirely trust to her yard crew.

So I obeyed her command.  Until last week, that is, as I talked with her daughter, who was planning Mrs. Watson’s funeral.  She died two Fridays ago, after a three-year struggle with all sorts of ailments; quietly, in the house she’d designed herself, with her family around her bedside.  Elegantly, in full command of her family’s affections, and a nurse hovering next to her; well into her nineties, having outlived everybody else of her generation in her family.

I figured it was now safe to tell her daughter about the turf mower.

And she laughed.

It was so Bill... the Lillie of the Valley.