It's A Good Thing Mrs. Hillbilly Mom Is Not An Indian Deity

Tuesday evening, my sister the ex-mayor's wife, the ex-mayor, Farmer H, and I met in Mom's basement. No, that's not a cool new restaurant. Not a bargain store. Not an initiation venue for a secret society. I'm talking about the actual basement in my mother's house.

The goal of this meeting was to divvy up the contents so we can proceed to closing on the sale next week. When all was done partially-completed after a three-hour session, about a fourth of the stuff had been moved from the shelves along the wall and placed in three disorganized piles on the floor. There was a Mrs. Hillbilly Mom stack presided over by Farmer H, a Sis stack presided over by the ex-mayor, and a stack for future dispensation at the auction, with Sis getting her half of the 80% left after the auctioneer takes his cut and Farmer H does all the work.

We won't go into the mind-numbing details, like when Sis snatched up an old peanut jar containing five marbles and shouted, "I will take the marbles!" No. Today's tale is not actually about the basement debacle, but rather about the ride home.

By the time we finally left, in four separate vehicles, the time was 8:20 p.m. Dusk was falling fast. The sun goes down quickly in the hills of Hillmomba. I steered T-Hoe along the back roads, past the cemetery where Mom now resides, past the hole-in-the-wall steak restaurant painted green, almost to the used car lot, but not quite to the new section of back road that runs behind the school where I should be sending The Pony if he didn't go with me to Newmentia. And there they were. PEOPLE WALKING IN THE ROAD!

It was so gloomy I barely saw them. I swerved across the center line and back, just enough to miss them. They were walking right at me. You'd think they had the common sense to get off the pavement. It didn't help matters that my right hand was full of a Burger King Double-Stacker, and that my left clutched a napkin and T-Hoe's steering wheel. Just as I darted back into my lane, at the crest of a small hill, a black Jeep with no lights on came barreling toward us. Tragedy was avoided because Mrs. Hillbilly Mom is a defensive driver. I knew that was a blind hill, and cut as close to those walkers as possible without hitting them. But I was NOT going to get completely into the oncoming lane when I couldn't see what might be oncoming.

"ARRGH! I HATE PEOPLE! IF I HAD THREE HANDS, I WOULD HAVE HONKED THE HORN TO SHOW THEM MY DISPLEASURE!"

The Pony was riding up front, sloppily ingesting a Whopper. "Are you sure that's ALL you would do if you had a third hand?"

"Well. If I had a FOURTH hand, I might have showed my displeasure in another way."