Image by Julius Silver from Pixabay
“So, I'm trying to do this Building Good thing, but the world is not working with me here!”
This was eight-year-old Edwina Ludlow before she went off to find her big cousin Mrs. Maggie Lee and left her big cousin Col. H.F. Lee, who was just then walking in, to soon find himself having to walk right back out after hearing the rest of his dramatic little cousin had to say.
“So, Cousin Harry said that since it's going to be really hot tomorrow, maybe I could do an Insta-Resort for us, but what we really need to do is take a trip through Europe because they have big, cold mountains there and big cool mountain lakes, but then this Covid thing won't even let us get down the road! Now, the Blue Ridge is right outside the back door, but it's not high enough – there's no snow to keep it cool! So how am I supposed to build good when no one else in the world is going to get things out of my way?”
“Wow, Edwina,” Mrs. Lee said calmly. “That was a lot.”
“It is – it's too much!” Edwina said. “This virus and the people running things need to get their lives together and start acting like they have good sense and get all this worked out!”
Some time later, Mrs. Lee found her husband in the garage, in the back of the car, still rolling laughing.
“I had to come back here so I wouldn't hit the horn – Edwina finally got to me!” he said. “If I did not know the Scripture does not teach reincarnation – if that was not her great-grandmother and my great-aunt Grandee Lee on a day that everything and everyone on the mountain was about to get their lives together or die trying –.”
“Yeah, I heard Hilda Lee Slocum-Bolling was every inch General R.E. Lee's great-grand niece in that she was usually calm and regal, but if you wanted to find out what the general's anger was like, mess around and find out with Grandee Lee!”
Col. Lee wiped his eyes with his handkerchief and caught his breath and told the story.
“See, my grandfather Horace is the patriarch of the Lees-of-the-Mountain now because he is Horatio Lee's last surviving child, but Aunt Hilda whom Capt. Ludlow dubbed 'Grandee Lee' was co-matriarch from the day she returned to live on the mountain until she died, and it was often said, 'Look, you better get it straight with God and Horace, because Hilda will bring this mountain down on you!'
“So, I must have been about ten years old when some cousin of mine tried it – he had gotten a few degrees at Virginia Tech and came back to talk down to the elders and how they were doing things on the mountain, and unfortunately, Papa Horace was out and Aunt Hilda was in. She read him the Riot Act, the whole Constitution, two or three volumes on the Peloponnesian War in which he was losing all of it, and then finished with 'I don't care what year it is – you take that and about a gallon of calamine lotion because your degrees have not even given you learning enough to know not to stand in the poison ivy!'”
Mrs. Lee fell over laughing, and Col. Lee put her in the car.
“Your turn – I'll go watch the kids,” he said as she rolled. “Meanwhile, you know my cousin is still twitching and itching, every time he remembers … we can never introduce him to Edwina, and we need to pray up so that we survive little Grandee Leedlow in there!”