We found the eatery of our desires on the edge of a large and very busy traffic circle, or “rotary” we learned it’s called in New England. We pulled into the parking lot, prodded our scions apart with whatever was handy and told them,

“You begin a fist fight in this place and we’ll make you kiss and make up in front of all the diners in there.” They quickly agreed on a truce.

Traffic, three abreast, was thundering around that rotary, and the noise was nearly deafening, a stench of exhaust, a blur of metal and squealing tires.

I squinted my eyes to see something in the middle of all that. There, in the very center of this vehicle inferno, was a large island of grass, and on it stood a beautiful old Victorian home, replete with gingerbread at all the corners, turrets, chimneys and a wrap‑around porch with a swing and hanging plants.

And amazingly, out on that velvet‑green patch of emerald sat an elderly woman in a red rocking chair, surrounded by a vast, wildly flowering garden. She wore a long white dress and wide‑brimmed straw lavender hat. And she was knitting! There she sat, rocking calmly, centered in serene beauty, unruffled by the din whirling about her.

Her courage? Obvious. When the highway kingpins coldly advised her of the meaning of eminent domain, this intrepid old woman stood her ground and told them delicately where best they might place their eminent domain, that she’d been there all her life and her parents and grandparents before, and no amount of money was going to budge her.

They built the highway around her.

Do I know this story for a fact? No. But that tableau made it obvious that this grand lady had the fortitude to stand up to the Big Guns, and she got them to back down. When there was a lull in the traffic, I yelled over to her and clasped my hands above my head in a victory cheer. She smiled and looked back down at her knitting.

The next act of courage is similar. I read about an old woman who’d lived all of her life in a tiny, wooden house on a strip of land on the beach at Atlantic City, New Jersey. A gang of money-hungry scoundrels were unfeelingly planning the destruction of the lovely old elegant town in order to build huge gambling casinos. They had to destroy her home to make way for a new emporium, and they offered her vast sums of cash money for it.

“Nope,” said she, and while I don’t know as she sat on her front stoop with a shotgun across her lap, this old gal staunchly guarded and refused to sell the home she loved and had raised her family in on the quiet beautiful beach near the memorable old boardwalk. And so Da Boys gave up and let her stay and built the huge hotel around and above her small home, and there it stayed, a minuscule, brave and frail wooden structure surrounded and nearly swallowed by glitz and marble and very bright lights.

Of course, we all know that the powers just hovered like vultures until these two intractable ladies died, and they then stomped in and quickly usurped the land. I wonder if I’ll ever have the chance to test my mettle this way, if in fact I’ve got any. I don’t think I do. But just in case, I’ll borrow a friend’s mettle detector to find out.

LC Van Savage is a Brunswick writer.

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