She was Ridiculously Hardworking, Hilariously Funny

I was young and green, two things that often go together, which made me ripe for picking. And Vaughnell loved to pick at people, with genuine, good-hearted intent. You had to be careful around her or else she’d have you twisted up and turned around at the end of one of her tales.

She had the prettiest yard in town and worked at it to make it that way and did it all on her own because she was what was called “a widow lady.”

One spring, I drove by her house and saw she was putting mulch on her shrubs by shoveling it out of the bed of a pickup truck into a wheelbarrow. So I decided to stop and give her a hand.

“Can I give you a hand?” I asked.

“No, I think you probably need both of yours,” she replied with a straight face.

It took me a second before I got it. Just like that she had me on my heels already.

I couldn’t think of a quick or funny retort, so I stuck to my plan. “I thought I’d help you load your wheelbarrow.”

Vaughnell surprised me by turning her back to the tailgate and leaning against it. Motioning to the shovel, she said, “Go ahead.”

That day, she wasn’t in her usual jovial mood.

I guess a lot can go on in a woman’s mind whose husband died and she had to raise three children on her own, and her friend’s husband committed suicide, and one of her grandchildren was killed in a car wreck. Yeah, that’s the kind of stuff that can weigh on a person.

That day, her conversation with me was on life and death and heaven, awfully deep water for a young man to tread in. Thankfully, I was smart enough to do more listening than talking.

I just kept shoveling mulch into the wheelbarrow because I felt like if I’d stopped it would’ve broken whatever spell had come over the two of us and the conversation would have been aborted.

Finally, though, she stopped, looked at the wheelbarrow, then at me. “You put too much in there. I can’t move that.”

“I’ll do it,” I gladly told her.

“No, I want you to take half of it out.”

Sweat ran down the small of my back by the time I finished. The whole time, Vaughnell didn’t say a word.

It’s what she said when I finished that has stuck with me ever since.

“Always remember,” she said, “don’t put more on a person than they can carry because you’ll make them feel weak.”

* Taken from The Wit and Wisdom of David Johnson, Volume I1: The Hairy Catfish Caper.