She. Kathryn Tucker Windham

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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

       She Moves In

       Cooking for She

       She Takes Naps

       I Cope, She Laughs

       I Forget, She Smirks

       She Is Slow

       She Electrifies Me

       She and Feng Shui

       She Edits My Stories

       She and I Remember

       Honey, She Shrank Me

       She and Pallbearers

       Editor’s Postscript

       About the Author

She Moves In

      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 of reading material, She promises to “have a big throwing-away. Soon! Very soon!”

      Though her reading is curtailed, She continues to write a little—on a rather strange assortment of topics. A casual remark can set her off. Recently, a guest mentioned General McArthur, and She immediately recalled his statement, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

      “He could have done better than that,” She commented, and for several days afterwards, She showed me variations she had written on the general theme of departing this life . . . lines such as “old explorers never die, they just get lost,” and “old quarterbacks never die, they just pass away.”

      My amusement egged her on, and She wrote more. There was “old radio announcers never die, they just sign off.” And “old runners never die, they just cross the finish line”; “old jockeys never die, they just drop the reins”; “old readers never die, they just turn the final page.” When I stopped laughing at her efforts, She stopped showing them to me. There are likely dozens more under her bed with the untouched issues of Time.

      I wonder if She has written one for herself, or for me. Probably not, because She has been too busy nagging me about neglected, half-finished projects I should have attended to long ago.

      “You need to clean off your desk,”