Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

by Beth Hoffman

he had a limitless gift for making me feel about as important as a lost penny on the sidewalk.

I think she was just happy to have woken up on the top side of the earth.

I’m not saying I wanted to skip through life in a rosy blur from one Disney experience to the next—all I longed for was to know one whole happy day.

Momma was dead, yet the day marched on as usual.

my ankles weak and my throat so full with hurt that I couldn’t swallow.

“Aging is a terrible slap in the face. My body betrays me every chance it gets.”

One had a blond beehive teased up as high and frothy as carnival cotton candy, and the other walked out with her auburn hair done up in a perfectly round bubble. It was lacquered so heavily that not a single hair moved when a gust of wind blew. As I watched the women come and go, there was no doubt in my mind that Wilma Jo’s produced the greatest cavalcade of big hair this side of Savannah.

I loved this time of night, how everything softened and lost the hard edges of day, and how, if the wind moved just right, the live oaks would murmur tender green words across the shadowy lawn.

the black boomerang of karma

that’s what friends should do: cherish the good and pretend not to notice the harmless rest.

sunflowers

From a distance they looked like a group of ladies with their heads hung low, as if embarrassed that they’d arrived at a party wearing identical hats.

a face embroidered with a web of deep lines

heat had caused her feet to swell like muffins over the tops of her shoes.

spent the summer living in a breezy, flower-scented fairy tale,

I was in the middle of an accidental kind of happiness that made me grateful for having a nose.

Before leaving the room, Oletta told me she loved me. Well, not the exact words I love you, but what she said was, “Ain’t no sun in the kitchen without your face lookin’ up at me.”

one of those strange moments where you’re so wide-awake and fully open that the air sparks when you move through it.

“It’s what we believe about ourselves that determines how others see us.”

Her laughter was a wondrous, liquid thing that splashed across my face, over the toes of my shoes, and into the grass.

It’s how we survive the hurts in life that brings us strength and gives us our beauty.”

Southern hospitality not only came from the heart but was a practiced social art that had been passed down from one generation to the next—like

Southerners had a way of doing things that made you feel special,

I folded the memory into myself, feeling a peace I’d never before known.

Wisdom comes from experience—from knowin’ each day is a gift and accepting it with gladness. You read a whole lot of books, and readin’ sure has made you smart, but ain’t no book in the world gonna make you wise.”

The Spanish moss hung from the trees like miles of torn green lace,