When I was young, we had a nice widowed neighbor lady by the name of Mrs. Mc Reynolds. Every one called her “Mrs Mac” and out of earshot “Ole’ Lady Mac”. Other than her physical appearance, Mrs. Mac was as nice of a lady and neighbor anyone could ask for. She would have made a double for a witch. She even had a wart on her long hooked nose, wore her gray hair long and flowing and wore a heavy dark cape and hat to keep her warm when she rode her horse. The cape was secured with a huge safety latch pin like a huge safety pin. Her husband died earlier; long before I knew her. If they had children, I never knew of any. She always rode a horse, even though there was an old antique automobile sitting in a barn. It sat on cinder blocks so the tires would not deteriorate. It had only a few hundred miles one it. My guess is she never drove and when her husband died she stored it. One day Mrs. Mac rode her horse to our house to talk to daddy about some work that she needed done. She sat on her horse and daddy stood in the yard beside her while they talked. At one point in their conversation, Daddy made mention of a guy that he thought was a very smart person. Mrs. Mac replied "Yeah, he is really a fart smeller". She had been laughing before that time, but then she suddenly stopped, snapped the reigns on her horse and quickly rode away. Daddy was always so amused when he repeated the incident. Another time, daddy reluctantly committed himself to shingle her small house. He was not about to go to her place alone, so I was elected to go with him to shingle. I had helped my daddy do it on our house, so he knew I was capable. The first day went well, but we did not get finished. The next day we went back to finish our job. We were all finished except around the chimney. As we were working, Mrs. Mac had climbed up the ladder and was talking constantly. Daddy was very nice and stopped a few times to reply. Finally as it was nearing noon, she said “I guess I need to go make my dinner”. Dad gave a sigh of relief, and told me that we needed to hurry to get finished so we could go home to eat too. No more than a few minutes had passed, when a huge cloud of black smoke billowed out of the chimney right into daddy face. He coughed sputtered and said “I recognize that smell it is egg shells”. Regardless of the sulfuric smoke odor, we broke away to breathe at intervals, but we got that shingle job finished in a hurry. She would have been back for another visit..

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Created December 24, 2020

Updated: 14 June, 2021

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