The Path to Love by Tommy Grevlos

Love has no middle ground. It is either the most enjoyable emotion in one’s life, or it can kill you. Sometimes, we can learn these feelings through other’s joys and sufferings. In Alice Munro’s short story, “How I Met My Husband,” Edie, the girl of hire, learns much about herself while observing others. Main characters and secondary characters alike play the major role in Edie’s quick development from immature adolescent to a maturing young woman.

There are many life-changing happenings that occur in Edie’s life through her journey of finding love. None are more apparent than her loss of innocence and a self-enlightenment or epiphany, which occurs near the tail end of the story. Her passage from girl to woman begins with her newly acquired job as a young housemaid. Innocent to the world around her, Edie only allows what she knows and has experienced to influence her decisions and opinions. She consistently points out the differences in the Peebles’ lifestyle from hers. Dr. and Mrs. Peebles are a middle aged married couple, and even though they appear nice and aware of other’s feelings, in all honesty, they are mostly worried about themselves and their family. Mostly, their feelings of superiority had conditioned them to think a certain way. “They like to feel you don’t notice things, that you don’t think or wonder about anything but what they liked to eat and how they liked things ironed, and so on,” (Munro 130). Their country home and surrounding town is all they seem to know. Edie feels fortunate enough to be working for this family, yet the differences in her childhood rearing are apparent in her thoughts. Within two paragraphs of literature, Edie tips at three different occasions when the Peebleses and her differ on varying issues. “…the Peebles thought she was a country woman, they didn’t know the difference.” “The Peebleses made her welcome, not knowing any better…” and, “’Have a house without a pie, be ashamed until you die,’ my mother used to say, but Mrs. Peebles operated differently,” (Munro 126). This is an acclamation to her immaturity at this point in the story.

Edie hints at her desire to break out of her adolescent shell when she snoops through Mrs. Peebles’ closet and ganders at trying on an expensive looking dress that is not hers. She decides to go through with the temptation. As she is performing a chore in the dress, a man by the name of Chris Watters enters her life, and with much surprise. He is the pilot of a local touring plane. His camp is local, and so close to the Peebles’ home that he surprises Edie when he comes to the screen door, asking to use their pump for water retrieval. Edie is so flustered with embarrassment and lost feelings that she agrees to let him use the house’s pump. Slowly, her youth begins to seep out into the obvious, and her conscious inquires to learn more about this strange stranger. As the plot progresses, Edie worries that the Pilot will talk to Mrs. Peebles about her dress being worn while she was away. This influences Edie to make an effort to talk to Chris. When she reaches him, she realizes that what she thought to be a mere acquaintance has a pull on her that she has never felt before. Her mouth gets dry, and her throat closes to a point where words are not allowed to escape. She realizes that the escape from her life lies right in front of her, with Chris, and his plane. Her life can change in an instant, and with a quick plane ride, she could be miles away from her old life, and many more miles ahead into a new life. What she doesn’t realize is her escape lies within what she will learn from Mr. Watters, not within the cockpit of his aircraft.

From the time she first met Chris, her maturity began to grow, and she started to leave the prolonged stage of adolescence. Edie narrates the entire story with internal dialogue, but we first get external speech from her when she makes her daily trips over to Chris’s camp. Munro does a wonderful job of portraying a clear difference between Edie, and the narrator’s account.

Halfway through the story, a shocking revelation is uncovered. We learn that Mr. Watter’s, the same man who had made it apparent to a young mind that he was interested, has a fiancé. This is yet another growing point in Edie’s life. A realization comes to her that she does have feelings for Chris, and now that she understands that he has a personal commitment to another woman, it starts to eat away at her emotions. She repeatedly finds herself spying on the pair, and the thought of Chris with another woman never leaves her mind. Jealousy can hint at the loss of innocence, because when one begins to feel envy, there has to be a reason. Jealousy doesn’t sprout up for just any thing, there must be something that is felt deep within the heart of the beholder. Such strong feelings are not felt by the innocent. This is especially for Edie because she is no longer just wondering about the pilot that makes camp across the field, but also the man behind the goggles. It occurs to her that there could be something more with their relationship, and not just casual day-to-day small talk. This attraction to Chris causes memories of she and one of her girl friends imagining their own intimacy, which was the beginning of her maturation. “Muriel Lowe and I used to sleep on her front veranda and watch her sister and her sister’s boyfriend say good night. Afterward, we couldn’t get to sleep, for longing for somebody to kiss us and rub up against us…” (Munro 134). These remembrances are slowly seeping into reality for Edie.

The next morning, the Peebleses decided to go on a family picnic. Alice, Chris’s fiancé, agreed to go with, and Edie was left to tend for the house. The picnic was scheduled to last from 11am to 5pm, so Edie knew she had enough time to talk to Chris. A while after the family had left, she baked a cake, and brought it out to the tent where Chris lay. At once, Edie noticed that something was out of the ordinary. Chris usually sat outside his tent during the daytime, but on today’s occasion, he was inside. As Edie enters the tent, Chris is happy to see her, but his mood still strikes Edie as different. We learn that he intends to leave the camp behind, and fly off, leaving Alice, and Edie, behind. The tent’s atmosphere soon changes, and without much elapse of time, Chris and Edie are kissing on his cot. This is the first time Edie learns of the love that she has been holding inside of her. Chris’s mere existence has given Edie the insight of what it is to be a woman, and sure enough the loss of innocence is apparent.

Edie was not in love with Chris, but she was absorbed in the concept of love. Her emotions toward Chris revealed more of an infatuation. When she experienced intimacy for the first time, the experience was so overwhelming that it clouded her judgments, and a quiet obsession arose. Everyday, Edie would wait by the mail box in hope of the letter Chris promised he would writer her. Day after day, the mail denied her of her dreams, but it did not shake her, for her judgments were still clouded. The mail boy became a curious character, but Edie was blind with obsession. There was a flirtatious feel between Edie, and the mail boy, and this friendship soon enough brought Edie to a self-realization. “One day walking back with the hydro bill stuck in my hand, that was all, looking across at the fairgrounds with the full-blown milkweed and dark teasels, so much like fall, it just struck me. No letter was ever going to come,” (Munro 140).

As Edie comes to this enlightenment, she breaks out of her shell of innocence completely, and becomes the woman that is narrating the story. With a quick end to the story, we learn that Edie ends up marrying the mail boy, and as this happens, she takes part in the true meaning of love. Sometimes, those that we least expect, give us more than we could ever have asked for.


Works Cited


Munro, Alice. "How I Met My Husband." Perrine's Literature : Structure, Sound, and Sense. By Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. Boston: Heinle, 2008. 125-140.