by Freida Marie Crump
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Greetings from Poosey.
No one could ever quite figure out the Skinner sisters. Both in their 90s, they’d been raised in the same house, both married, then after 50-plus years both were widowed within months of each other so they moved into a big old two-story house on the east edge of town. But that’s where the similarities came to a crashing halt. Maude, the older sister, was just about as kind a lady as you could find, the type that you figured God was surely having a good day when He made her. Lola, on the other hand, was the very definition of meanness.
Lola chewed out paperboys, the Schwan’s man, the postmaster, the UPS delivery guy, the checkers at the grocery store, and just about every soul who had the misfortune to run into her. Look up “crab” in the dictionary and there just might be a picture of Lola. All of which caused Maude to spend the final years of her life apologizing and trying to somehow make up for her sister. Lola would destroy it then Maude would come along behind her and try to patch things up.
I remember the day we got a new preacher and Lola had a fit because he wouldn’t stay behind the pulpit. She confronted the young clergy after the service and told him, “We put that pulpit there for you to preach behind. We don’t need to wandering all over the place like a wild steer,” then huffed her way homeward. This was the poor guy’s first preaching assignment and it shook him a good deal to think that he’d have to follow his new church’s strictures so closely. Maude had overheard her sister’s rude tirade and went to see him that evening. She told the young minister, “Pastor, my sister didn’t like the last preacher because he entered down the right aisle instead of the left, and the one before him was guilty of the sin wearing a rainbow-colored vestment.” She added that some 20 years ago her sister had stopped attending church because the minister put a long “a” on the word “amen.”
And the real mystery is how two such different ladies could have been spawned from the same womb. There was of course some speculation that Lola wasn’t born at all but simply appeared on some dark night when God was busy elsewhere.
Last week we saw murderers decapitating people on one end of the globe while in Nepal a 4-month-old was rescued after being buried for 22 hours and a young man was carried alive out of the rubble by somehow staying alive for over 40 hours. Both were freed by teams of volunteer rescuers who’d gone days without sleep. How could both groups of people be a part of the same human family?
A 45-year-old mother in Katmandu went running through her apartment building, waking the residents to warn them of the Nepalese earthquake, she carried her two daughters into the street then ran back inside to help the elderly in her building. Her name was Ara and they found her beneath the wreckage on the following morning. How could she belong to the same race of animal planning to set off bombs at the Vatican that same week?
We watched in collective horror and dismay as the city of Baltimore was put through the emotional wringer last week following the death of a young man. In the same camera shot we saw rioters intent on destruction standing just feet away from young men with their hands in the air, trying to stop the carnage. They might have lived on the same block. They might have attended the same school or church. In many cases they were the same race. How can such things be?
Some say that free will was the most dangerous gift God ever gave us. I won’t disagree. And we must remember that “news” is only news because it’s an aberration from the normal. We should be thankful that good news is not considered newsworthy, but it still leaves us wondering how folks so otherwise similar can somehow turn out so extremely different from each other.
Lola died first, a blessing to all of us since we couldn’t imagine life without Maude to make up for her. Word has it they had to hire her pallbearers, but that might have just been a story. When Maude died four years later we had to move the funeral to the Legion Hall to accommodate the crowds. I guess that in the end we all get what we deserve.
You ever ‘round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.