What It Weren’t

Sometimes I allow myself to get lost on the junk-route and make turns and twitsts all about. (I have a GPS, I can get home). One such day I went the back way behind the mines (phosphate) and started day dreaming. Before I knew it I was in the middle of these small clap board homes that were a hundred years old. The homes were oddly similar and although kept up, not much life showing around the area. I knew that these were heritage places, where milk cans were stools and chickens were pets and dinner.
Recently, I was told by a friend that I don’t wear enough makeup. I said, “Listen bitch, I wear a gob..it just gets rubbed off all damned day long!”. She didn’t buy it so lately I have really been trying to whore-it-up, make-up wise, and this was one of those days.
I digress… So, even though I was only like 40 minutes from my house I felt worlds away. I saw an old lady wearing one of those apron smock deals full of clothes pins hanging her laundry on a clothes line and in her yard, all growed up in weeds was an old iron bed. I pulled over.
I introduced myself to the lady who was about 70 and plump with wild ass hair and was wearing those turn of the century shoes with a heel and the apron and capris with martini glasses embroidered on them. My mind wandered as I wondered what motivated this old gal to get up and dress like”Deliverance Goes to Stein Mart” but in a skinny minute Wichitaw’s (her name, no lie) hubby rounded the corner all puffed up like a rooster just a gettin’ it with his cane and pointed index finger. He was all wanting to know who I was and where I was fromand why was I wearing more face paint than a street walker  and who sent me and did I have kin there and if’n my Daddy worked for the government and would I be staying overnight. I was like, “Hold on there, Poppi, I just wanted to ask about the bed frame you got all up in the weeds”. Wichitaw told the old man to go get him some chew and set a spell inside where the fan was cool. Turns out Wichitaw and the old guy are Common Law spouses. (Whatever that means). Evidently, he told her in 1960 that he had cancer and if she’d be his old lady (and take care of hom) she stood to get a lot of money when he died. So Wichitaw cooked and cleaned and sewed and gardened and ironed and scrubbed and toiled for now going on 52 years living in a house the size of a postage stamp. I asked Wichitaw if she loved him and if the amount of money (yes, I wanted to know how much) was going to be worth spending her whole life at the clothesline and if she minded cutting off chickens heads to eat for supper- you know, the general “getting-to-know-ya” run down of questions. She told me that he was worth “a quater million on paper and another 50 in land”. I thought to myself that 50 million plus was not a bad retirement plan. Then she said, “What it weren’t was cancer. He ain’t got no cancer. He is gonna outlive me.” I shuddered a little bit in the hot sun and wondered that if I stayed there too long would I get sucked in too. Wichitaw said I could have the bed she originally put it out there 30 years ago as a “flower bed”. She said ain’t been flower one it in ever since. Well I sure as hell didn’t want it and it’s bad JuJu. I got up out of there and haven’t made a rouge junk wander in weeks.