I've always been a little confused about when autumn stops and winter begins. I'm not referring to the dates but rather the weather. It seems like the two seasons are one. Just after the trees shed their colored leaves, from out of nowhere, here comes cold. Not cool. Cold!
I've never been a fan of cold weather. I'd rather be too hot than too cold, and I hate being too hot. Even as a kid, growing up in the 1950s over in Middle Tennessee, I couldn't take the bitter low temperatures of winter.
I did my fair share of sledding and snowball fights. But I was the first one to call it quits and race back home to the wall heater. As far as I was concerned, the best things about cold weather were the holidays - Thanksgiving and Christmas. Mostly, Christmas.
They let us out of school a week before Santa came down the chimney, and we didn't have to report back to the "penitentiary" till a few days after the new year.
I was elated to have the time off, but it was cold outside. I used to start thinking about school letting out for the summer in January. Still, it was a good time for me to make some money by chopping wood and bringing in coal for the little town's senior citizens.
For a few of my childhood years, I lived out in the country. Almost everyone who lived in town was old.
My grandmother, Miz Lena, used to get after me about calling old people old. She'd say, "Looka here, 50 ain't old." As a little boy, I thought people were pretty much close to dying by the time they turned 50.
Once when my grandparents and I were sitting at the breakfast table, I asked Grand Mom what she considered old. She took a sip of her coffee and with a snicker, said, "Yore granddaddy." Grand Dad didn't flinch and kept right on reading the paper. Grand Mom said, "He's deaf, too."
Anyway, I worked for most of the old people in town. All of them had white hair or had a hard time hearing or couldn't see very well or all of the above. They were much older than 50. To my way of thinking, they were old old. About the age I am now.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I can't believe just how quickly I got to "here." When they talk about something that happened in the '90s, it sounds like yesterday to me.
Do the math, and that was 25 to 30 years ago. As Miz Lena's housekeeper, Elizabeth, used to say, "Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm."
My grandmother, not being completely accurate on sayings, had her own take on life. She'd say, "Time flies when yore havin' fun, or you ain't."
She may not have gotten the quote spot-on perfectly, but she was absolutely correct. Having fun or not, the days, weeks, months and years of life keep right on ticking.
Of all the old people in town, Mrs. Dooley was by far the oldest. She lived next door to my Cub Scout den mother, Mrs. Silva.
I met Mrs. Dooley, in mid-December, over by the high hedge that separated the two ladies' houses. In the cold months, the hedge lost its leaves, and you could see through it. They said she was over 100 years old and not all there.
I was in Mrs. Silva's backyard, raking up leaves. I'd rake the leaves up in large piles, then run and jump in them, then rake them back up again. It was fun.
I looked up and saw Mrs. Dooley waving at me. I waved back. She kept waving, so I kept waving. It took me a minute to realize that she meant that she wanted me to come over to her. I reckoned that it might be that when you get as old as she was, you can get your "hello" and "come here" waves mixed up.
I trotted over to the hedge and squeezed through it. I'd only gotten glimpses of Mrs. Dooley walking around in her backyard with a swarm of cats and a couple of old, white-faced, orange dogs following behind her. This was the first time that I'd seen her up close.
She was a little bitty woman, short and thin. Her skin was as white as her hair, which she wore pulled back in a bun. She had old-age spots on her hands, arms and forehead and a mole on her chin. She wore thick glasses and stood bent over. No teeth. She little-step-walked with a wooden cane.
As cold as it was, she was wearing only a thin cotton dress, one of those schoolteacher dresses, with a pink, fuzzy shawl draped around her shoulders and a pair of drab-green rubber boots on her feet. She had quite a look going on.
I walked up to her and before I could say anything, she reached out and put her weathered, skinny little hands on my shoulders, looked down at me, straight in the eyes, and, in her tiny, shaky voice, said, "Sonny Boy, have yuh accepted Jesus Christ as yer Savior? Have yuh given yer heart to Jesus?" I'm pretty sure that I said yes.
She seemed pleased with my answer. Then, she patted my shoulders and asked me my favorite question, "Would you like a slice of pie?" Without hesitation, I said, "Yes, ma'am, I would." She said, "Let me go heat up the oven" and began her short-stepping journey back to the house.
She walked so painfully slow that I recanted and told her that I was just fine and not to bother herself with the pie. She kept walking. I decided to walk with her. We went slower than they do coming down the aisle at weddings.
We got to the steps, and she balanced herself with her cane with one hand and the other holding onto my arm. Only three steps up to the back screened porch took a while.
I was relieved to get inside. I'd worried that she might fall. Plus, my arm was tingling. She had a "country-strong" grip, the kind you develop growing up Southern. As old as she was, she could have bent a fork or popped a basketball.
As she headed toward the kitchen, I told her that she need not go to all the trouble of heating up the pie. She looked at me and with her no-teeth smile, said, "Ice cream goes better with hot apple pie."
My good manners gave way to rationalization. I thought, "Well, if that's what she wants to do, who am I to stand in the way of her happiness?"
I sat in a rickety black chair at her kitchen table. One of the old orange dogs lay at my feet. The other one settled on a hook rug in front of the sink. All the cats meowed and circled in between and around her feet and rubbed up against her ankles.
Mrs. Dooley stood by the open oven door waiting for it to warm up. She asked me two or three more times if I'd connected with the Almighty. Each time I said yes.
I asked her how it felt to be a hundred years old. She said, "I ain't there, yet. Not till Christmas. Jesus and me was borned on the same day."
She talked a little about her life: riding to school bareback on a pony, the Depression and stories about her "already with the Lord" family.
She'd named her dogs after her sons but hadn't gotten around to naming all the cats. One of them, her favorite, was named Boots.
Every few minutes, she asked me my name. I kept telling her, "Butch." Then, over and over, she'd say, "Same name as my cat." Respectfully, I tried to correct her. Finally, I just said, "Yes, ma'am."
Mrs. Dooley asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I don't remember what I told her. She kind of chuckled and said, "Hun, yuh better be good, or Santa'll just leave yuh a lump a' coal." I said, "Yes, ma'am."
It sure was good pie. So was the vanilla ice cream. I thanked her profusely and crawled back through the hedge with a new appreciation for old people. Especially the old old ones.
That was the last time I saw Mrs. Dooley. She pretty much stayed indoors. Mrs. Silva checked on her almost every day. Anytime I asked Mrs. Silva about her, she'd say that Mrs. Dooley was "still kickin'."
A few days after Christmas and Mrs. Dooley's 100th birthday, I was at Mrs. Silva's. She said that Mrs. Dooley had asked about me and gave her a Christmas card to give to me.
There was a portrait of Jesus wearing a halo on the front cover. I opened it and, in scratchy, barely legible handwriting, she signed it, "Merry Christmas, Boots."
(This little ditty is dedicated to Mrs. Margaret Varnell, who turns 96 years young in three days. Happy birthday, Darlin'.)
Bill StampsBill Stamps' books, "Miz Lena" and "Southern Folks," are available on Amazon. For signed copies, email bill_stamps@aol.com.