Our Life With Baker Edmisten
By Pam and Jerry Williamson, who knew him well.
We’d heard tall tales about Baker Edmisten long before we met him. He was a fixture at our local Farmers’ Market and a do-gooder countywide. Word had it he was a rabble rouser, a saucy joke teller, and a dumpster diver. A soul mate, in other words, but we found out later that the rumors (which all turned out to be true) were only a very small part of a very important story.
The first time Pam met Baker in person was when our neighbor died and left her older husband having a hard time making it on his own. Pam would walk over a plate of dinner from time to time, and on one of those drop-ins, she finally met the infamous Baker Edmisten, toting a pie. His stiff-legged dog Bandit by his side. Pam fell in love with both of them from the get-go.
Baker lived up to the legend. Over that summer, Baker came by to till our neighbor’s garden for him, then plant it with summer produce, and then pick it and drag the bushels up to the front porch. All the while our neighbor cheered Baker on, watching his every effort, and bragging about how good those beans were gonna taste cooked up with a piece of ham.
When Pam’s elderly Mom moved in with us, Baker welcomed her to the neighborhood with a huge glass apothocary filled with snacks along with canned sardines and tiny bottles of Jack Daniels Velcro-ed to the sides. Mom ate the insides. Jerry drank the outsides.
He brought us fresh sausage, bottles of his famous Pig Whizz barbecue sauce, jellies and jams that he had made in his own personal kitchen in the basement of his house. He never came empty-handed.
We were probably like others who either laughed or pretended to be offended at his terrible and unfunny jokes. Even the one where he asked Bandit if he’d rather be dead or a Republican, and Bandit dutifully rolled over dead every single time.
The three of us became fast friends. But Baker fell hook, line, and sinker in love with our annual community plant sale. In fact he BECAME our annual community plant sale. He whistled when he arrived late afternoons with a piece of junk for the sale in the back of his truck. Chairs without bottoms, copper cookware with holes. The lid off of something. An old whiskey bottle. Gothic pedestals. A cache of old garden hand-tools. Tubs of forest moss. Or the table with three legs he insisted someone would buy because they could lean it against the corner of their porch and no one would notice. He sometimes even made us buy some piece of that junk. And then we haggled.
Sometimes he gifted our own gardens with his found delights. We would come home one day to find a carnival horse prancing out of high ferns in one garden bed. Another day a shiny ball welded into a rusted iron circle tucked into a climbing vine. And then, our personal favorite, the back end of a plastic saber toothed tiger skeleton disappearing into a weed patch.
We’re still listening every single day for Baker’s whistle. It was a whistle like no other. A whistle of delight and excitement and a demand of “come look what I found. There’s not another one like it.”
But we’ll especially miss the little things Baker found in his life travels that he knew we, like he, would appreciate as something of beauty and value. Tiny, glossy lime-colored rocks. Petrified mushrooms and fungi. Pieces of decayed and absurdly curved wood and jagged branches. Fingernail sized acorns with shiny caps. All matter of dead forest floor finds. He would then carefully inspect the miniature gardens that Pam made for the plant sale to see how she had worked those special finds into them. They would smile at each other with the completion of each creation, satisfied that it would delight another soul on plant sale day with a renewed faith in resurrection and hope.
We loved Baker Edmisten. Because not only did he love life, he loved everything in it. Even us. The world was a better place because he was in it. And while we will sorely miss everything about Baker, he will be an eternal light in our world for the rest of our lives.