“Some people enjoy poor health and that’s why they stay sick. It’s the attitude ‘dahhlink’ (darling)–the attitude!” She loved to dabble in a German accent for fun.
She was nearing seventy when I married her middle child. My own mother died when I was a teenager. “Mama B.B.” and I were friends from the beginning.

My late husband and I surprised her with two grandchildren after her other four grands were “middlin’ sized.” My children followed her every step during our years on the home farm. What a faith walk it was!  She planted by the almanac and lived by the Bible.

“He always says He’ll go before us, I have to believe that in order to make it every day. ‘Dahhlink’, just take what comes and know the good Lord is kickin’ in the doors ahead of you. If it’s locked, he’ll break open a window. You might have to wait awhile, but prayin’ and waitin’ go hand and hand anyway.”

Our walks through the countryside and talks on the telephone yielded sage advice. It still rings true today. Some of her morsels were:
•    You have to make a wide swath around an ill man.
•    Don’t brood; find a hobby or some service to God and your fellow man. Weave that life around your home and you’ll be happier.
•    Take as little medicine as you can, doctors have an important place in the world, but God made the natural stuff, like herbs and roots. Don’t put all your faith in medicine; let God have the biggest dose of your faith.
•    Go to church as often as you can. While in her seventies, the church van would pass her walking the mile from her home to church and offer her a ride.  She would wave and say, “Thanks, but I’ll make it!”
•    On one of our walks she commented, “I walked as a school girl so why should I stop now?”  Her health theory was later validated–she died in her early nineties.

We’ll soon have a family gathering, one of those that makes everybody reminisce about folks who can’t be around. Her strength and that of her middle child will be there. There has to be a funny German guardian angel with a Pickens County dialect in heaven.

Mama B.B stays alive within our family through these memories that somehow have a heartbeat of their own—yes, the good Lord and family guardian angels have us covered.

“My ‘dahhlink’, you’re surrounded.”

“Now I have to go get my own paper,” was Daddy’s only nod to grief. My dad was never a dog person. He surrendered to the ladies in the family who wanted a dog. Since Daddy was the only male, he was outnumbered. Our next dog was a nervous, carpet-wetting Chihuahua named Nippy.  My mother tried tricks from every canine training manual in the Winston-Salem Public Library. When visitors came, my sister and I were placed on “doggie deposit” alert. If a really important guest came like the preacher or one of Daddy’s clients, the dog was banished to the bathroom. When I released Nippy from the bathroom she was rewarded with a new coat of pink nail polish.

Nippy also met her reward (or punishment) on the same curve of our busy street. I was devastated, but my dad’s first act was to replace the carpet, he seemed ecstatic despite my grief.

I had a long interlude without animals until my children were born. Stephanie and Mike, just like their dad, watched “Wild Kingdom” and read the ads from the Humane Society in the Easley newspaper. A trip to see friends who raised animals yielded a dog.  I wasn’t along for the ride so Steve and the children took advantage of my absence. Little Bit was a twelve-pound, part Chihuahua and part Terrier with a nervous carpet-wetting demeanor. Now it was my turn to pay for the agony my dog Nippy had caused!

I made a firm declaration; this dog would never see the inside of my house. Lord, make my words sweet, for tomorrow I might have to eat them! Two months after making that statement, a car hit Little Bit. She lived very well after that. We rushed her to the vet for surgery in the amount of $1,000 before being released with a hip brace, medications, and a firm warning not to let her sleep outdoors. The children could hardly suppress their glee all the way home.

Even after the brace was removed, the dog limped badly. She earned the nickname,  “Arithmetic Dog” because she put down three and carried one, (leg that is!)

As the years passed, her expenses mounted with a variety of problems:  sterilization after an affair with a German shepherd, an infected tooth, treatment for arthritis, and kidney problems.

However, her companionship was invaluable, especially as she rested beneath my husband’s hospital bed near the end of his life. She stood patiently as my daughter dressed her in a ballerina tutu and brushed her teeth. At the age of fifteen, she died peacefully and was given a respectable burial. The night she died, Stephanie, Mike, and myself had a three party telephone cry as we remembered Little Bit. There would never be another dog so loving and loyal. That’s why I’m no longer a dog person, there’s not another who can compare.

Bill and Ann Coogler

I love to write, but I hate to cook.  My husband, Bill, is very patient about this, but also, very thin.  I can make a big cooking show at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but my kids know that after that Bill exists on my eraser shavings.  He is patient with the closed door to my office that says, ‘creative minds are seldom tidy.’ He listens to less than stellar writings and grins patiently before he falls fast asleep over them.  This writer is less than organized and I married a military man whose disciplined, organizational skills are legendary.

Somehow we manage to come together between paragraphs to dance, swim, and travel.  On the twenty-sixth of each month Bill brings me flowers to celebrate our ‘month-a-versary.’  July 26th we’ll commemorate our thirteenth anniversary.  We began our marriage as ‘tollmates’,  he the accountant who handled my tax preparation. Since I have been crippled by a math phobia since first grade, Bill worked diligently to be sure my numbers were correct.  His finesse at working with math calculations astounds me.

With God’s help, we  have made this unlikely combination work. Bound by writing paper and ledgers it is a match made in heaven.