Life’s Greatest Lesson
By
(This story was first
published in 2001 as the
award-winning essay in Expressions from
Home, a
publication of the Weakley County Arts
& Humanities
Council. The essay had to be a very
short 250 words, a
very difficult assignment
indeed! Ruth Rickman passed
away just a few years after this
essay was written,
perhaps about 2004. Everyone misses
her.)
My friend Ruth Rickman, who would soon turn
ninety-five, needed someone to stay
with her while she recuperated from pneumonia. I felt close to her, but I’d
begun work on a book, and too much had already interrupted the writing. What if
those two requested nights turned into four, five, or a month of nights?
However, I knew the thoughts were selfish ones, so I put them away and stayed.
I’m glad I did.
I’m afraid I’m a poor caretaker though. The first
night I kept her up too late. She
loved to talk about
the old days, and since I’m a
lover of history, I
listened, enrapt. A question, such
as, “Do you
remember what year electricity came
to Palmersville?”,
netted the answer “1940” and the
story of her young
son who had died in ’39, how
she had sat at his
bedside waving a cardboard fan for
days, and how it
was too bad electricity hadn’t
come a year earlier,
when an electric fan could have
relieved her feverish
son.
She also told me the gruesome tale of a local man who
had come to her grandfather’s
store to buy fresh meat
from a hog killed that frigid
morning and how he’d
left with the meat in his Model
T but never made it
home. He and his car drove off a
levy and into a
swamp. When the community
searched and found him stiff
and frozen near his car, they
took his body to his
widow’s house where they stood him
in a corner to
thaw.
Before I left that first morning—late, since we
stayed up till
hand and pressed it with her
own, blackened by the
needles and tubes of her recent
hospital stay. She
thanked me for staying and said she
loved me. I hugged
her ninety-two pound frame.
When she kissed me, I
wondered why I had ever thought I
was too busy to stay
with her. Ruth had taught me the
most valuable lesson
of all: love is everything;
take time to show it, for
nothing, nothing else at all really
matters.