She’s always up for a challenge

As I’ve said before, my sister is an individualist, not so much because of what she does, but by the way she does it. There are few undertakings she won’t approach head on, nor is she often faced with a situation she doesn’t pitch right into and accomplish to her satisfaction. In other words she likes a challenge, and she was in the throes of coping with one a few days ago when a stranger showed up in her yard.

I wasn’t there when it was all going on, but word spreads quickly and I was being favored with a prompt account of that particular incident probably because it had occurred at the time of my sister’s birthday, the day she was celebrating a special birthday — her 95th one.

A stranger had climbed the hill up there in Virginia where my sister lives. She was not there to deliver a birthday remembrance, nor, for that matter, to waste any time on small talk. When there was no answer to her knock on the wide open front door a voice from somewhere in the yard called loudly, “I’m over here!” though the perpetrator of the announcement remained invisible. The visitor said she had come to see Mrs. Merrill on official business. I don’t remember whether she said what the business was, but it doesn’t matter anyway. What did matter was that the voice seemed to issue from some vague area of outer space.

Needless to say the stranger expected immediate mention of the invisible person’s location, but there came only repetition of the nondescript “I’m over here.” The stranger tried again. “I need to see Mrs. Merrill,” she said, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a bit of urgency echoed through her request that time. It seemed simple enough to my sister to repeat that she herself was Mrs. Merrill.

Yet the visitor must have thought it odd that whoever was communicating with her remained out of sight. But while she waited for someone to appear she drank in the beauty of the surrounding countryside, the flower beds and lush pasture lands. She looked at a magnolia tree in its prime — and “heavens to Betsy,” as the old idiom says, there was my sister, plain as day. She was sitting on a bough up in the magnolia tree, and she was holding a small saw with which she intended to remove some young limbs that were growing too long for the magnolia tree to maintain its symmetry. With the help of a ladder she had reached the lowest bough and had climbed on up to whatever boughs enabled her to prune the ones just above them. The fact that she was wearing a skirt rather than slacks during her climb seemed to be no deterrent. As far as I know blue jeans were never a part of her wardrobe.

I don’t know whether the visitor accomplished her mission at my sister’s house that day, but it is to be hoped she did, otherwise she might have gone back when the forsythia bushes were being pruned. My sister admits finding that job a rather difficult one since, according to her, she has 35 or more of them growing on a bank too steep for good footing, and it’s doubtful whether hanging on to a bush with shallow roots would stop her descent once it was underway. Of course she did have to plant the forsythia bushes, but doing it was just another one of those jobs she pitched into and did to her satisfaction.

Louise Bailey is a native of Henderson County and lives in Flat Rock. She is the author of several historical books on the people of Henderson County and writes from a lifelong interest in the history of the area.