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Also by Kathryn Tucker Windham
Treasured Alabama Recipes (1967)
13 Alabama Ghosts and Jeffrey (1969)
Jeffrey Introduces 13 More Southern Ghosts (1971)
Treasured Tennessee Recipes (1972)
Treasured Georgia Recipes (1973)
13 Georgia Ghosts and Jeffrey (1973)
13 Mississippi Ghosts and Jeffrey (1974)
Exploring Alabama (1974)
Alabama: One Big Front Porch (1975)
13 Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey (1977)
The Ghost in the Sloss Furnaces (1978)
Southern Cooking to Remember (1978)
Count Those Buzzards! Stamp Those Grey Mules! (1979)
Jeffrey’s Latest 13: More Alabama Ghosts (1982)
A Serigamy of Stories (1983)
Odd–Egg Editor (1990)
The Autobiography of a Bell (1991)
A Sampling of Selma Stories (1991)
My Name is Julia (1991)
Twice Blessed (1996)
Encounters (1998)
The Bridal Wreath Bush (1999)
Common Threads (2000)
It’s Christmas! (2002)
Ernest’s Gift (2004)
Jeffrey’s Favorite 13 Ghost Stories (2004)
Alabama, One Big Front Porch (2007)
Spit, Scarey Ann and Sweat Bees (2009)
She
The Old Woman Who Took Over My Life
Kathryn Tucker Windham
1918–2011
NewSouth Books
Montgomery | Louisville
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2011 by Kathryn Tucker Windham. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.
ISBN: 978-1-58838-278-8
eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-103-2
Visit www.newsouthbooks.com.
To Ben and Dilcy,
who helped me put
She in her place.
Contents
I can’t recall when I became aware that an old woman was nudging her way into my life. At first her presence was hardly noticeable, but as my years soared into the nineties, it was no longer possible to ignore her presence. She disrupts my plans, demands my attention, shames me into completing abandoned projects, requires nutritious meals, curtails my away-from-home activities, hides things from me, makes my handwriting less legible, and pushes names and events into the deepest crevices of my mind even while prodding me to tell and write old family stories and traditions.
Sometimes acquaintances, many two or three decades younger than I am, ask, “Now that you have curtailed your travels, what do you do with all your spare time?”
I laugh. “Spare time? I don’t have any. I am the caregiver for a crotchety old woman and that’s a full-time assignment.” Then I have to explain that I am not a nurse, I do not get paid, and although I have known the woman for as long as I can remember, I am still surprised by my role as her primary caregiver.
It is not a job I applied for.
Since I’m not a nurse, it is fortunate that my charge does not need nursing care. She does need to be reminded to take her medicine and to use her eye drops.
I refer to my ward as “She.” Most of the time She and I get along rather well, but She—in her old age—seems to have become more opinionated, more set in her ways, more interested in what happened years ago than in today’s news. She used to read three newspapers every day and read a national news magazine weekly. Now She barely scans our thin local paper, and stacks of unread copies of Time gather under the edge of her bed. When I mention the growing accumulation
