Locals called Buddy’s place “The Temple” because, as one prominent church lady sniffed disapprovingly, “The name of Our Dear Brother Jesus is spoken there more often than at the First Baptist, even though it is always in vain!”

Buddy Sattva had attained nirvana as far as his personal cosmology was concerned.

                After his folks died and he dropped out of high school, he was left with only three problems:

1. He loved deer meat but was too lazy to hunt.
2. He loved beer but got too drunk to drive home.
3. He loved socializing or “shooting the shit” as he called it, but see #2.

So he started his own home-based business.

                First, he and his buddies moved an abandoned boxcar from the derelict railroad depot downtown to the property his parents had left him. This was not easy and required vast amounts of beer, nobody could remember how much, and as a result nobody could remember exactly how they’d accomplished it especially since it was done in the middle of the night.

                The boxcar fit right in next to Buddy’s doublewide. He equipped it with a walk-in cooler and a cutting table and hung up a sign with the silhouettes of two deer heads complete with six-point antlers over the name of his business: Two Bucks Deer Cooler and Smokehouse.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Helena Handbasket gritted her perfect teeth. That Soybean Queen dig hit home.

                Thick glossy black hair was all that Perra’s papa left her before he moved further north to pick apples. That crowning glory, along with the low-cut spangly red dress stitched by her mother, joined forces to unseat Helena from the annual Cotton Queen throne where she had ruled for a decade. Soybean Queen was like taking Second Place, or as Laura Mercy had so cruelly pointed out, First Loser.

                “Where’s Buddy? Is he in there?” Now that Perra had zinged her she prayed that Buddy really was in there so that she could shoot Perra with a clear conscience. Her fine sense of Southern morality allowed blood vengeance against a man-stealer, but did not allow her to shoot Perra in cold blood just because she hated the bitch’s guts.                

“Buddy Sattva has never been here,” Perra stated flatly. “Why don’t you check at the Temple?”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Still sporting that wicked smile, Helena jerked the wheel abruptly to make a hard left into the Squalor Holler Trailer Park. Perra Cabrona’s singlewide was all the way in the back. Daddy’s Caddy flung gravel as it screeched to a stop under the Spanish moss hanging from a lightning-blasted old oak.

                Helena leaped out, shrieking “Come outta there right now!” She brandished the pistol and fired a shot in the air. A clump of Spanish moss fluttered helplessly to the ground and lay like one dead. Laura Mercy allowed as how she believed she’d wait in the car.

                Perra opened the door of the trailer while pulling a brightly colored K-Mart kimono around herself and walked outside barefooted, blinking sleepily. She barely glanced at the pistol. “Wassup?” she yawned.

                “Where’s Buddy?” demanded Helena.

                Now Perra perked up and looked interested. “Why, I wouldn’t know, Missy,” she smiled slyly, “I wouldn’t have thought the Soybean Queen of Twenty-Eighteen would have any trouble finding a man.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Helena Handbasket’s left hand steered her Daddy’s Caddy while her right hand stroked the Smith & Wesson 38-calibre 5-shot Airweight laying on the leather upholstery beside her. Her Daddy presented her with the gun on her 16^th birthday. A smile slipped past her set lips as she remembered ripping away the gold wrapping paper and red ribbon, lifting the box lid to behold the glittering silver handgun nestled on pink satin.

                “Oh Daddy!” she’d squealed, throwing herself into his arms, “it’s exactly what I wanted! I just can’t wait to shoot it!”

                “I know, I know,” Daddy growled, gently extricating himself from her grip. “Whoa, look at the time, gotta go.” He made a hasty exit. Even Daddy knew that his Baby Girl was a ticking time bomb with flame-colored hair. He trusted her to use the gun to defend herself. He did not, however, trust her to make mature decisions about who she needed to defend herself against. He also knew that his Baby Girl, as much as she loved her Daddy, blamed her Momma’s frequent fainting spells on Daddy’s long ongoing affair with the woman he was headed out to meet, Betty Didd, or as Helena referred to her “Daddy’s Fucking Floozy”, DFF for short, which Hel pronounced Diff.

                “What’s the Diff?” Helena muttered resentfully as Daddy fled, but then she brightened as she imagined showing off her new little friend to her old friends. “A true Southern lady wants those country boys to know she carries her own ‘protection’, after all.” Her Revlon Crimson Ember-lipsticked lips curled up into a wicked smile.

TO BE CONTINUED…

Good news: I wrote a book!

Even better news: you can read it right here, for free!

I will publish one chapter per day in this space, just like an old-time serial. I hope to provide a little entertainment, some light amusement for these dark days.

So, without further ado, here is CHAPTER ONE of HELENA HANDBASKET:

Fiery Southern belle Helena Handbasket went looking for her errant beau, pistol clutched in one elegantly manicured hand. Her shy galpal Laura Mercy rode shotgun.

                “I’ll put a bullet right between his lying eyes!” Helena yowled as her Daddy’s Caddy purred down the Possumslaughter Highway toward Squalor Holler. “If I find him laying up with that sorry bitch Perra Cabrona I’ll shoot her too!”

                “Oh, Hel,” Laura sighed, using the childhood nickname. Turning from her extreme closeup in the passenger seat visor mirror where she’d been touching up her Revlon Fainting Rose blush, she shook her blonde head sadly. “’Twon’t do no good. Once a man strays he’ll never behave, even if you do kill him.” Laura held a low opinion of men in general, having been left at the altar by three would-be beaux who turned into won’t-be husbands. “You cain’t change a man.”

                “Oh yes I can,” cooed Helena. “I can change him from livin’ to dead.”

TO BE CONTINUED…

Sometimes The Old Lady just doesn’t feel like cooking.
Some days are just about “heat and eat.”
But canned food doesn’t have to be boring.
“My traveling spice rack is small but diverse,” said The Old Lady sagely. “Sampling a flight of seasonings, one at a time, while eating canned food turns a routine meal into an adventure.”
LISTEN to The Old Lady!

October azaleas
Blooming out of time.
Crazy weather.
Crazy year.
No use to cry
“Wait for Spring!”
It’s different,
Now,
Better blossom
While you can.

“My experiments eating weeds have resulted in stages of discovery,” lectured The Old Lady as she devoured another mess of greens.
“First I found that, properly prepared, they taste good.
“Second I discovered how satisfying they are, how fully fed I feel.
“Third I noticed how strong and energetic I feel.
“The fourth and final proof is how I feel when I don’t eat them. My body misses those wild greens!
“Store-bought kale helps,” noted The Old Lady, “but it doesn’t bring me to the same level of wellbeing.”
LISTEN to The Old Lady!

Autumn in the woods means spiders, as they desperately spin webs to catch enough food so that they can lay their eggs. In the woods. Which is fine.

What is NOT fine is when one drops on your head and runs down into your shirt.

The Old Lady calmly captured the spider on the floor AFTER she flung it there during a wildly improvisational and panicked dance, sort of a tarantella punctuated by frantic patting juba.

“Nothing brings out my boogie woogie,” squealed The Old Lady as she tossed the creature outside, “like a spider in my shirt!”

LISTEN to The Old Lady!

“There is a serious lack of good cornbread in today’s world, ” grumbled The Old Lady.
So she had to make her own.
First, proper ingredients: stoneground yellow cornmeal mix, buttermilk, and bacon grease.
Next, technique: with a single-burner propane stove it’s hoecakes which really are corn pancakes.
Heat the bacon grease in the skillet, stir up cornbread mix with buttermilk, add some of the sizzling grease, and cook until golden brown.
“Nothing brightens a gloomy day like a steaming hot hoecake. Break it open and inhale that hot cornmeal fragrance. Take a bite and savor the smokiness of the bacon grease and the tang of the buttermilk. “
The Old Lady took another bite, rolling her eyes in delight.
“Now THAT’S good eating.”
LISTEN to The Old Lady!