Aunt Belle makes up her mind

Years ago, when my friend’s Aunt Belle quit her husband, the news spread through their small Alabama town like kudzu growing on a hot summer day.

“Why who ever heard of any such?” gossiped the ladies in Belle’s every other Wednesday study club. “She just up and quit a perfectly good husband. Got into her brand new Cadillac and drove away without a fare-thee-well.”

Belle was quick to tell any of the curious masses who didn’t hesitate to inquire that she had not suffered one dew drop at the hands of a cheating, drinking or wife-beating husband. “Good as gold,” she said and continued to say until the day that life left her body. She had deserted him for what the town’s authorities in such matters deemed the most inexcusable excuse of all.

Belle had up and quit her 10-year childless marriage because she simply did not love him.

“Anna Belle Katherine, how could you?” gasped her sister, Claire. “You’re Mrs. Robert Edwards IV, scion of the town’s most prominent and prosperous family. They own banks in two counties! You could never do better. Never! What could be more important than that?”

“Myself,” Belle replied firmly, picking up her purse and white gloves then taking immediate leave of her sister’s company.

A few years ago, before Belle passed from this world, she had smoothed the lace-trimmed sheets of her sick bed with withered, age-spotted hands, straightened the collar on her pale blue satin peignoir set and told her niece the story.

“One morning, I was preparing Robert’s breakfast – two eggs slightly over easy and very crisp bacon – when it suddenly occurred to me: I didn’t love him. Not one iota. Not for all the beautiful clothes, big houses and fine cars he could buy me. Two days later, I packed up lock, stock and barrel and left. Never looked back either.”

My friend leaned in closer, resting her elbows on the edge of the bed. “Was it a hard decision?” she asked, her tone one of desperate searching.

Belle shook her silvered but still elegant head. “I decided that I didn’t want to live for the love of a man I didn’t love. I wanted to live for the love of life.”

And that she did. With great zeal. Over the next few decades, Belle’s family regularly received letters and cards posted from exotic places like Rome, Paris and Tangiers. She found romance but shunned commitment on a cruise along the Amalfi coast, on an African safari and once during a three-day weekend in Sausalito, Calif.

Belle proved to be a woman of independence and spirited determination long before the invention of The Pill or the creation of the Equal Rights Amendment. While her town contemporaries had been shocked that Belle didn’t want to be Mrs. Anybody, especially Mrs. Somebody, Belle was quite happy to give her love and devotion to nobody but herself.

The week after Belle’s casket was covered with six feet of her native Alabama soil, my friend took her aunt’s lessons to heart. One morning, her husband came downstairs for breakfast to find a note leaning against a silver cream pitcher that his mother had given them on the occasion of their last anniversary.

“I’m not leaving you for anything you did wrong,” she had written in that beautiful, cursive script of hers. “I’m leaving you because I find I must make a choice in love and I have decided to choose my love of life over a loveless marriage. Your eggs and bacon are in the warming oven.”

And with that, she had gotten into her brand new SUV and driven away. This time, no one in town even flickered an eyelash.

Funny what a difference 50 years can make.