I Has A Sad

I just received word that a dear lady that I have known my entire life has passed on.

She was the neighbor lady that lived across the street from My Grandmother and was 100 years old last Christmas time.

My Grandparents bought the house that they lived in from her and her Husband way back in the fifties and they lived across the street from each other for over fifty years.
Her husband died back in the sixties and she lived there alone until well into her late eighties when her son and his wife moved in to help take care of her. My Grandfather died in seventy three and my Grandmother also lived in her house until well into her eighties alone.

Those two were quite the pair.

My Dad and her son were best friends and went into the Navy together in the mid fifties, another son had gotten killed when the boys were out drinking and raising hell in a car wreck on Dead Man's Corner. Missed the turn at a high rate of speed.

My Grandmother never had a washer and dryer , didn't have hot water in the kitchen later on for years and absolutely refused to let anyone come in and fix it.Frugal to the bitter end even when there wasn't a reason to be. Stubborn as only an Irish woman can be too.
I lived with her for several years and she is the reason why I finished High School. The poor woman about worried herself to death over me and I gave her good reason to because I was a wild little bastard back in the day.


They added onto the small house they bought as they could to make room for four kids and as time went by all the additions started leaning away from the original structure and settling so bad the doors wouldn't move as they had become load bearing devices.She had an oil stove that burned diesel but also had a small wood stove she burned paper trash in and was still chopping wood and cutting kindling well into her eighties. My Granny was wayyyy Old School and will be 101 here in late June if she hangs on.

The last straw was when we found out that there was a hole in her bedroom closet floor big enough that you could hide a body in that she had almost fallen into several times.



Her four kids, my Father,Aunts and Uncle got together and purchased a new Double Wide and had the old house torn down and burned.


Those two women were a fixture in that little out of town neighborhood for decades.
They had a little signal going on in the mornings when they got up later in life that was pretty clever.

When one of them got up in the mornings, they would open the curtains in the kitchen to let the other one know that they were up and everything was OK that morning.
If the curtains didn't get opened up by a certain time then that meant something wasn't right.
Someone was sick or something and that meant a phone call was in order to find out what the problem was.

Daphne's husband had built a huge shop that I am jealous of to this day and the neighbors would ask to borrow it on occasion.

She didn't like letting people use it because of the liability but there was another neighbor that she would let use it I believe that was just to give her something to complain about.

When Grandma had to drive to town to pay bills, she couldn't just mail them because there was no mail boxes out front, she had a PO Box, she would let Daphne know and those two old birds would go running around and always wind up at Burger King for a Whopper.

That used to crack my ass up.
Daphne used to send me five dollars in a card for my birthday until I was almost fifty years old.

Rest In Peace my dear lady.