Queen Bee Goes Home Again
Read Queen Bee Goes Home Again Online
Authors: Haywood Smith
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This book is dedicated to my precious friend and confidante, Willow Heart Catron, who has been a model of grace, patience, and faith both in living and in dying.
And to all my precious friends who have gone to heaven before me:
Kappy and Roslyn and Bess and Cindy and Gracie and Vera, to name a few. We will meet again in the presence of Christ, but I sure do miss them now.
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Acknowledgments
First, thanks goes to Dr. Donald Dennis of Atlanta, allergist, surgeon, and ENT, whose research and regimen have helped me live without pain or inflammation for more than seven years. God bless you!
I also give thanks daily for my precious sister Elise for being Christ's hands and heart in my life, showing me what true perseverance, agape love, and acceptance look like, even in the face of her own physical and emotional challenges. What a joy and privilege it is to have you as my sister by blood and in Christ. And thanks to my sisters Susan and Betsy, who have done the same. I love you so much.
I also love my brother James Hill Pritchett, on his terms, but no less deeply.
And thanks to my son and daughter-in-law, for making sure I don't go without health insurance. God bless you for your help and generosity. And to Blackshear Place Baptist Church for being such a wonderful community of God and generous helper.
Thanks also to my wonderful editor, Jennifer Enderlin, for her guidance and help in making this book a reality. What would I do without you? And to my agent, Mel Berger, for helping put food on my table and much-needed prescriptions in my medicine chest. And to my wonderful copy editor, Ragnhild Hagen, who catches my mistakes and errors in continuity.
And thanks, too, to my wonderful friends and the Red Hat Club. What love and acceptance I always find from you.
Thanks, also, more than I can say, to all the readers and friends who have prayed for my granddaughter, who has a rare form of epilepsy, and supported legislation in the Georgia State House to allow cannabadiol (a nonintoxicating natural marijuana extract for treating seizures) to be used in our state. At this writing, the bill passed the Georgia House, but was made unpassable in the Georgia Senate Health committee, so we are packing to go to Colorado to see if the Charlotte's Web extract helps.
And to all my readers who let me know they enjoy my books: Your wonderful e-mails never fail to lift my spirits, no matter what challenges I face. That is why I write what I do, to encourage and bring laughter to you all.
To those of you who don't like something, please be merciful and keep it to yourselves. Neither I nor my books are perfect, no matter how hard we try. Fortunately, books are like food: Everybody likes something different.
I also owe thanks to Hayes Chrysler Plymouth for putting Queenie back together after a deer hit us. And to Maaco in Lawrenceville, Georgia, for always doing such a great job with Queenie's dents and scrapes. The older I get, the more there are.
My life has never been a dull one, so I am thankful to God for all the material He gives me. And for the 12-step enabler's program that got me outside of myself and showed me a better way to live, a way devoid of judgment that starts every day with gratitude instead of worry, helping me live with joy, no matter what. Between that and my Bible, I'm doing great. And there are more books in me yet.
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Contents
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One
Don't you just hate it when God hits the replay button on the tough stuff in your life? I sure do, and when He hit it in my life a year ago, it was a biggie.
A lot has happened in the year since that day: wars were fought, disasters raged, great things began, and great things were lost, but I was too caught up in the minor miracles and tragedies of my own little life to notice. (I
did
vote, though; happily on the local level, but when it came to Washington, I had to choose the lesser of the evils, which I am seriously sick of, but I voted anyway. Use it or lose it.)
On that blazing July seventh a year ago, I took the long way back to my mother's (Miss Mamie to everyone, including my brother Tommy and me) at 1431 Green Street in Mimosa Branch, Georgia.
Despite all my efforts, there I was, moving back to my mother's domain. Again.
The phantom umbilicus that connected me to my mother had turned into the string on a yo-yo.
Ten years older than I was the first time I'd had to move back home. Ten years tireder. Branded as the local scarlet woman for something I didn't do. And really, really ticked off.
Anger was the only energy I had left.
Through all the tribulations I've enduredâand there have been a fewâmy prayer has always been
Please, God, let me pass this test the first time, because I sure don't want to have to take it again.
Apparently, I must have flunked the first test ten years ago when I'd had to move in with my “eccentric” (read: crazy) Southern family in the town I'd married to escape.
I hadn't had any other options then, either. My straight-arrow CPA husband of thirty years had gotten engaged to a stripper and supposedly spent all our money (including what we owed the IRS), so I'd lost everything but what I could carry and the furniture I'd squirreled away with friends in Buckhead who'd promptly dropped me after the divorce.
This time around, I had the economy to blame. After years of working twenty-four/seven selling houses during the building boom, I'd finally managed to buy my own little brick ranch ten miles from town, then disappeared into the blessed anonymity of exurbia. My own little Fortress of Solitude.
Boy, was that a relief after being under constant scrutiny in Mimosa Branch.
But when the real estate bubble blew, plunging the economy into a depression, I was once again reduced to penury, upside down in my mortgage.
So on that hot, fateful July seventh a year ago, I'd signed over my house in a short sale for a fraction of its true worth and finally given in to Miss Mamie's pleas to come home and help her with the house, now that the General and Uncle B were roommates in the Alzheimer's wing of the Home, as the local nursing facility was known by one and all in Mimosa Branch.
Everybody but Tommy and I called my daddy the Generalânot because he'd been one in the military, but because of his dictatorial personality and the fact that he'd been the premier general contractor in Mimosa Branch for fifty years, till age and Alzheimer's caught up with him.
Heading for my mother's from the lawyer's office, I tried my best to be grateful that I could move into the garage apartment again. I couldn't even scrape up a deposit for lodgings elsewhere, much less commit to paying rent. At least I wasn't in a shelter, which definitely wouldn't have fit my small-town aristocratic sensibilities, or my mother's.
Which left me right back where I'd started a decade before: not-so-instant replay, on a cosmic level.
Give thanks in all things, the Bible says, but I wasn't doing very well with that one under the circumstances.
As I had in my divorce, I climbed up in the Almighty Creator of the Universe's lap, beat on His chest, and asked Him why this was happening. Again.
And cussed about it, but only in my mind. Not as bad as I had cussed ten years ago, mind you. Back then, I'd been so hurt that vulgarities I'd never even
thought,
much less said, became my mantra for almost a year. My very prim Christian marriage counselor/psychiatrist at the time had told me that if cussing was all I did, I was doing great, all things considered.
Ever since, I'd done my best to clean up my act, but my thoughts were still rebellious. I'd replaced the cussing with
shoot
and
rats
âand in extreme cases,
antidisestablishmentarianism,
backwardâbut God knew what I really wanted to say. Yet He is still steeped in grace, putting His arms around me in comfort, not in condemnation.
So there I was, towing a crammed U-Haul trailer behind my crammed 2009 Chrysler Town and Country minivan (paid for when I was selling houses hand over fist, thank the good Lord). I turned onto Main Street from South Roberts, only to find myself the last in a long line of stationary traffic.
Traffic, in olde towne Mimosa Branch! (The merchant's association had tacked on the extra
e
s at the height of the building boome.)
About ten cars ahead of me, a restaurant delivery truck was blocking all of my lane and half the other at our local upscale bistro, Terra Sol, which was probably a major traffic violation, since there was a perfectly good alley in the back. Definitely wretched timing, unloading during the lunch rush.
Not that I was in any hurry to finish moving into the garage apartment I'd renovated on the first go-round, but I've always been a face-the-music-and-get-it-over-with kind of person.
Taking advantage of the traffic backup, I punched in the previous calls screen on my Walmart prepaid cell phone, then scrolled down to my best friend Tricia's number and pressed the green receiver button to call her. I heard a nanosecond of dial tone, then the phone beeped out her number in Alexandria, Virginia. After four rings I was about to hang up when she picked up the phone, breathless.
“Sorry,” she panted out, “I was out deadheading my roses.”
Thank goodness she was there. I really needed to vent. “Well, I'm headed back to Miss Mamie's from the lawyer's office with the last of my earthly goods, and I feel like throwing up.”
“Poor baby, poor baby, poor baby,” she commiserated, one short of the four
poor baby
s I felt the situation merited. “I don't blame you for feeling sick,” she soothed. “So the house closed?”
