Miss Earl

Early in the 1990s Cindy and I bought our first house. It was a homey little place that suited our growing family well. It was less than 1000 square feet, but it had a kitchen, living room, bathroom, and three bedrooms. I remember decorating the third bedroom in preparation for the arrival of our first baby girl. That was a new experience and a lot of fun!

We lived, as we told everyone, “next to the farmers’ market on Rutherford.” The street was North Acres Drive, and it was shaped like a tennis racquet—one two-lane road that led both in and out with a loop of houses at the top. We lived in #2, the house you’re facing when you come to a stop at the top of the handle.

As I cast my mind back over the few years we were there, I find a set of disjointed but mostly warm memories. . . .

·       One Father’s Day I came out of the bedroom and saw little Ben, probably three or four years old, eating his brown-sugar toast (cut up into bite-sized pieces with no crust, thank you, Mom!) and looking at a newspaper circular advertising riding lawn mowers—just like an adult man reading the morning newspaper over his breakfast. To see him “reading” an ad for mowers on Father’s Day made me laugh out loud—and it made me quite proud of my son. He was really into mowers for a while—he loved to follow me around the yard when I was using the push mower, “helping” me mow or pushing his own toy mower “just like Daddy.” I won’t apologize for saying this: If you’re a young dad having experiences like this with your little ones, treasure them! Treasure them!

·       I remember meeting some new neighbors, Carl and Janelle. You know how when you see certain people, you feel a connection right away—“They look like our kind of people”? Well, Carl and Janelle struck me that way. I saw them walking by one evening and said hello. It turned out they hadn’t been married long. When I asked them how long, Carl looked at his watch, which really made me laugh. “If you’re still looking at your watch to figure out how long you’ve been married,” I said, “you really must be newlyweds!” Carl and I both now have adult sons named Caleb who are taller than we are. The years continue to pass. . . .

·       I remember when Janet and Lois moved in next door. They were an elderly mother and daughter who became our good friends. Mom Lois was so sweet natured that you couldn’t help but love her. Janet, her daughter, was a tough old lady who loved her cigarettes and loved griping about her family members—all of them except her mother, whom she loved completely. They loved our kids and loved having our young family next to them—and Cindy and I loved them too. Sometime I may do a post about them. Both are gone now.

·       The family across the street from us was the Rameys (not their real last name). Now, there was no question that our whole neighborhood was on the lower side of the lower middle class, but it was still filled with wonderful people who took pride in their properties. Not the Rameys. Their place had junk and broken-down cars on the lawn, and the house was run-down. They were scary people. They never spoke to anyone beyond the confines of their yard. The parents looked hard, unhappy, and unfriendly. And their teenaged son often wore a long black trench coat and a black Stetson-style hat. Although this was years before the horror of Columbine, teens who wore black trench coats in those days were associated with the Goth culture, with death metal, with drugs, and were generally furious at life. Having the Rameys across the street from my wife and kids made me nervous.

But one day the Rameys put a for-sale sign up in their yard, which gave me hope.

When I pointed the sign out to Miss Earl, she said, “They ain’t goin’ nowhere. You’ll never git them outa there.” And she was right. The sign stayed up, but no one came to look at the house, and when we moved away, they were still there.

Now, about Miss Earl: her full first name was “Earldeen,” but in typical South Carolina fashion, she was simply “Miss Earl” to everybody in the neighborhood. She was a character, someone whom everyone knew and who knew everyone—and who, if you wanted to know anything about anybody in the neighborhood, was the person you went to to find out. I suppose some would call her a gossip, but I always thought of her, truly, as someone who really just loved her neighbors and was interested in all the details of anything that was going on.

She was down-home and likeable. She was probably in her sixties then, a white woman with a dark complexion and suspiciously jet-black hair who dressed in comfy sleeveless tops, shorts almost to her protuberant knees, and a well-worn pair of denim sneakers over white ankle socks. Interestingly, she eschewed above-the-waist foundation garments normally worn by women her age. (I’ll let you figure that one out.) And she nearly always had a dip of snuff in her lower lip. When she did, she would thpeak with a bit of a lithp.

“Hey Thteve!” she would call when she saw me coming to mow her lawn.

One time I saw her from quite a ways away and hollered, “Hey, Miss Earl!” But she didn’t reply until I had walked almost up to her.

“I’m thorry I ditnt holler back,” she said. “I couldn’t yell becauth of thith peeth of choc’late candy in m’mouth.”

A piece of chocolate candy! I thought. Oh, Miss Earl, do you really think there’s anybody in this neighborhood who don’t know you dip snuff?

“A piece of chocolate candy”! I’ve laughed about that comment many times since then! If she was telling the truth (which she wasn’t), that was the most long-lasting, sour-smelling, nasty-looking piece of chocolate candy I have ever seen! Yick!

In my experience I’ve found that many good old dyed-in-the-wool Southern folk can tell at least one story of a supernatural experience. Miss Earl was no exception.

“One time after my husband died,” she told me once. “I was layin’ in the bed one night all alone and missin’ Robert. And I looked out the window, and I seen a bright light way up in the sky. And it come closer and closer and got bigger and bigger until it come right through my window, and it was like it went right into my eyes and disappeared. And I knew that was Robert lettin’ me know that ever’thing was all right.”

We sold our house and moved out of that neighborhood to a larger home in 1994. I don’t remember whether I said good-bye to Miss Earl. That’s the thing about life—any farewell can be a final farewell. You may never see the person again. And I never did.

I miss you, Miss Earl! Lord bless you wherever you may be.

Copyright 2024, Steven Nyle Skaggs