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PatchWork |
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PatchWork |
Last Updated 09/06/05
Email: joy@our-town.com
Mrs. Morrison’s Glasses
by Joyce Whitis
The Morrisons, who lived just up the road , were fun to visit, when I was ten. I was welcome to pick the biggest peach in their orchard anytime, or swing in the tire that hung from a fifteen foot rope tied to the limb of a giant cottonwood in their back yard. There were other attractions too, like that big stack of National Geographic magazines in the front bedroom. I used to sit on the floor and look at the pictures and read about the Duckbill Platypus, the Koala, Wombat and other animals that I’d never seen and dream about someday sailing to far off Australia where I could see them for real.
In that same bedroom was the only feather bed I ever saw. I tried jumping on it but just sunk down without getting any traction. Such a mattress might be great in the winter, because you just buried in up to your eyes, but in a Texas summer a feather bed must be pretty grim. I can understand why they didn’t stay popular.
Dad and Mother Morrison were pretty interesting themselves. Mr. Morrison was deaf. They said he’d never heard his youngest son speak and because he couldn’t hear, he often drove to town without shifting from second gear. We used to look at each other and say, “There goes Mr. Morrison” when we’d hear the motor of his old Ford laboring, pulling up the sandy road in second gear.
Mrs. Morrison was a snuff dipper. She’d pick a small twig from a peach tree, chew the end into a brush, and dip up snuff. She dipped snuff all day right along with her work and neither the cow milking nor the snuff dipping seemed to suffer a bit. She had a lot of expressions that I never heard anyone else say, like…”I wrung out the hide and threw it over the fence to fill up again.” This meant that she had milked the cow and turned her out to pasture. On a day when the horses broke down the lot gate and demolished six weeks’ growth of sweet corn, the hawks carried off all the baby chickens and the sucker rod on the windmill broke, she was apt to remark, “This world and one more and then comes the fireworks!”
When she heard that her son had been chosen president of the local Chamber of Commerce, she grinned and exclaimed, “I feel like I’d been hit in the tail with a wet goose!”
As her 68th birthday drew close, Mrs. Morrison, who had never been sick and still had most of her teeth, decided she needed glasses. Mr. Morrison already wore glasses which he bought for 50 cents at Woolworth’s. He would try on pair after pair until he found what he liked and then he would shout at the startled salesgirl, “I CAN SEE JUST FINE WITH THESE.” Since he was deaf, he assumed that everybody else was hard of hearing.
Mrs. Morrison wanted prescription glasses and since she considered buying on credit a sin, began to save her egg money toward the purchase. Finally the day came when Dad Morrison took Mother Morrison to town, three miles in second gear, and she had her eyes properly tested. The good doctor exclaimed in wonder that she could see enough to keep from running headlong into barbed wire fences.
When the glasses were ready, the Morrisons stopped at our house so we could properly admire the genuine prescription glasses.
I thought Mrs. Morrison looked different with the gold-framed bifocals perched firmly on her nose, but there was something else besides the glasses that made her seem strange. I ran to meet them before they could get to the porch and she stared at my nose. “I never knew you had so many freckles,: she said.
We sat on the porch, rocking and drinking iced tea. Mother asked our friend how she liked her glasses. “They’ll take some getting’ used to,” was all she had to say. The next time I saw our neighbor, the glasses were gone so I asked where they were.
“Well,” she answered, securing a snuff-covered twig in one side of her mouth, “I put them glasses in their velvet-lined case, snapped it shut, and stuck it in the bottom dresser drawer. I always thought I was a pretty decent housekeeper but with those glasses, I saw dirt I’d never noticed and when I looked at the flower beds, there was weeds comin’ up everywhere. I could have lived with the dirt and the weeds and I could live with a man who’s getting’ a powerful lot of lines in his face, but I can’t abide an old woman with snuff all over her teeth wearing gold-rimmed spectacles!”
I thought she was going to laugh but she grew solemn, then said, “When I die, I want to be laid out in them gold-rimmed glasses and that’s the next time I want to wear ‘em. When I get to the Pearly Gates, I figure they’ll be things I want to look at, but there just ain’t many things on this earth that I want to study that close.”
She was an old lady when she died, many years after her husband, and living with a daughter in Houston so I didn’t go down for the funeral. I wondered if she was wearing her glasses but I’m sure that great lady had no trouble finding the latch to those Pearly Gates, with or without her glasses.