In The Sweet By and By, Bring Squirting Sunflowers

In a family, if we're lucky, everyone has at least one special role for which they're appreciated. I am my family's trivia master and clown, the one who points out the dark and light humor in most every situation and knows classic TV families' histories as well she knows her own. My younger brother, Mike, does free brake jobs on family members' cars and, now that our dad's dead, provides punishable-by-law, tasteless jokes at family functions.

My older sister, Linda, gave our parents their first grandchildren, saving me scads of money and, perhaps, a long stint in a padded room. And years ago, Linda took on the job of helping our mother place floral tributes in our family's cemetery plots on Decoration Day – funny, since it turns out she's the sibling most freaked about dying. It's not because she's oldest and likely to go first, I tell her, but because she's worried that once she's pushing up daisies, I'll place huge plastic sunflowers that squirt Pinot Grigio on her grave and shame her in front of generations of Harney teetotalers. I like the God's-gonna-get-ya look on her face when I tell her that, and the no-cremation speech I get when I tell her she'll have to find my poor little ashes before she can fling flowers at them.

Anyhoo, decorating 30 graves – those of her husband, our cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents and our father – is not a job Linda takes lightly, though, unlike our maternal grandma, she does not start worrying about tributes for the deceased members of our family around Valentine's Day.

“Helen, do we have all the flowers yet?” Grandma asked our mother several times a week in the days leading up to Decoration Day. “Yes,” my mother replied, running from the room before Grandma, whose caterwauling version of “In the Sweet By and By” was neither sweet nor gone bye-bye soon enough, started “singing” and whipping out her list of whose grave needed what. I cannot imagine that happening to my sister, because she does not sing and as far as I can tell, has never made a list in her life.



But today, as Linda and our mother traveled from one country cemetery to another, it hit me: My sister fills one of the most important roles in any family - that of the person who walks the walk when it comes to a sense of family responsibility. No matter where she is a week before Decoration Day, Linda always finds her way to those dusty back roads and easily overlooked cemeteries to make sure those who've “gone home” are not forgotten, calling me from the truck to tell me where she is and how everything looks.

While I make jokes about how only our father would want a flying fish on his tombstone, to complement our mother's praying hands, Linda's there at Daddy's side, worrying about whether she and my mom “got to everyone” this year. I hope that when she and all those Harneys and Moores and assorted relatives meet on that beautiful shore – where Grandma's still screeching, I bet – they shower her with more roses than Secretariat got on Derby Day. She'll deserve that, at the very least, after my squirting-sunflower sendoff.

No, I Will Not Take $1 For That, You Dickering Dolt

You were not at my yard sale last week. I watched for you, knowing you would want the things I have culled from my life, things that in some cases, I can't remember buying, needing, wanting or ever seeing. So today, I wound up carting the whole mess to a thrift store in need of donations. I am pretty sure I heard one worker snickering as one of his colleagues asked if I needed a receipt for my taxes. Right, mister. A woman in a 9-year-old Hyundai who's snatching one of the T-shirts from her donation as she hands it to you really needs a receipt for her taxes.

I am reminded of yard sales past in this piece:

I envisioned getting up early that Saturday morning, trucking my junk out to the yard and chatting with pleasant people who would scoop up my unwanted treasures and force money on me.

The way it turned out, it was Saturday. I did get up early. And except for a woman who muttered, "Whaddya got?" and dropped cigarette ashes on her chest as she pawed through freshly washed clothes, most of the people who stopped by were pleasant.

But the next time I say I want to have a yard sale, I hope someone binds me, gags me and stuffs me in a closet along with everything I didn't sell, including a perfectly good Bald-Headed Man Halloween disguise.

That's because in only four hours, I learned that many people should never go out in public, hagglers make me very tired -- and that in my case, anyway, one person's trash is often not only not a treasure, it's really and truly trash.

Sold by the yard

Planning a yard sale is fairly easy. Decide what's junk. Clean it. Place an ad, put price tags on stuff that is now not junk but eclectic collectibles and, after you can't sleep because you have to get up early, get up exhausted and drag everything outside.

Actually staging the event, and watching avid yard-salers, is a sociological hoedown, one that makes me want to lock 10 people with $4 each in a room full of used tools, furniture and mismatched dishes -- just to see what wackiness ensues.

At my sale, I had customers who offered $20 bills for 50-cent purchases. Dickerers (my daddy taught me that word. Isn't it great?) who wanted to haggle over $1 vintage platform shoes. A man, obviously a used-furniture dealer, who swooped in, tried to dicker (but I wouldn't), bought chairs and swooped out. People who live down the street and now, sadly, know way too much about my belongings and feel sorry for me.

Don't forget the looky-loos. I, for one, tend to take it personally when folks -- who, face it, are spending Saturday morning looking at other people's crap -- pull up to the curb in their cars, roll down the window, look at my things with a critical eye and drive off laughing.

And for the record, I hate everyone who showed up more than an hour before my sale was set to start and shot me dirty looks when I said, "You're out early today, aren't you?" How would you like it if you had a store in your house and I showed up two hours before opening time -- about the time you dragged your behind out of bed --and banged on your front door, yelling, "Are you almost ready?" as you put your pants on?

Stop, thief!

I was arranging things in the yard when my first time-challenged customer, a sweet-faced, elderly con artist, arrived in a late-model truck.

Granny wanted to dicker over a $3 decorative bowl. I am not ready to deal at 6:45 a.m. -- especially when I haven't finished my cappuccino and the dickerer is driving a vehicle nicer than mine. I agreed to take $2 because she was old and I am unflaggingly polite to a woman who might die on my porch, her head striking the $2 bird cage just before she expires on a moldy "Family Feud" game.

I turned my back for 10 seconds to get my money box, only to return and see the penny-pinchin' pilferer climbing into her truck, bowl in hand. I got my cash, though I felt a little guilty about shouting "HEY! DID YOU FORGET TO PAY ME?" at the top of my lungs as Clara the Klepto tried to make her getaway. Overall, the sale was a stinker. A dud. I've had better luck selling aluminum cans. But at least by the time the last gawkers turned up their noses at my eclectic pile o'junk, I had $103 in my cash box, a few less mounds of clothes in my closet -- and a message for my sticky-fingered pal:

You've got my bowl. I've got your license plate number. And next time, Granny, we're gonna rumble.

Ten years ago, I wrote the following column for my then-67-year-old mom on Mother's Day. This morning, as most every day, we had a chat that ran the gamut from what's wrong with Republicans (we still haven't figured that one out) to why my garden won't grow to what we're reading and how big the rock she grew up under had to be to house her whole family. She loves David Letterman, Whoopi Goldberg, a good book, euchre, the outdoors, tearjerker movies and flowers. She doesn’t like whiners, indoor dogs, beer, the F-bomb or eye shadow. I have never called her "Helen." At 77, she tells me, it would be weird if I called her anything but "Mommy." "That's my name," she says with a smile. "Don't wear it out."


She makes the world's best chili and blackberry jam, encourages me to speak my mind and is the only person I know whose laughter really peals.

She taught me how to tell time, tie my shoes, use right-handed scissors on my left hand and later, how to change the oil in a 1969 Falcon.

She could work all day in a factory, come home, take a bath and entertain my friends and me as if she were a cross between Donna Reed and Paul Bunyan -- all before heading to the field to farm tobacco with my father.

I am not sure when I realized my mother was a flesh-and-blood woman, who along the way maybe had a dream or two that didn't involve her kids or husband, or her mother, who lived with us for 23 years.

To hear her tell it, you see, we children, and the grandchildren, are her dreams come true.

And I believe her, when I go home, and she runs out the door to stumble over her three crazy dogs and greet me with what I call the Mommy Smile. We hug. She swears she'll get rid of all of us one day. She doesn't, because she's, well, Mommy.

Life lessons

Before she became Mommy, my mother was a varsity cheerleader and valedictorian of the Class of 1950 at Renaker High School. In her senior photo, Helen -- that was her name then -- is a stunner with wavy brown hair and cheerful eyes. She is smiling, as she always does in my mind.

Instead of going to college, she married my father and had three children, with yours truly in the middle.



When I was 4, my brother was a blob in a bassinet, and my sister, five years my senior, was at school five days a week. So my mother, then 28, and I exercised to Jack LaLanne's TV show, read stories and had tea parties. And every day, not long after my sister got on the bus, I'd demand to play school.

Every hour or so, I'd ask my mom what Linda would be doing at that moment, and we'd do the same: Math. Spelling. Recess. "She's having a snack," my mom would say once a day.

I would carefully divide my candy into two pieces and ask my mother to put Linda's share in the refrigerator. She told me not to expect Linda to save half of her candy for me.

I am sitting here right now with a frosted honey bun. I am not saving any of it for anyone. My mother taught me well.

Friends forever

I'm not sure when my mother became my friend, because I can't remember when she wasn't.


Perhaps it was when we were baking cookies, and, so the story goes, I looked up and said, "You're a good mommy."

Perhaps it was when I was a 17-year-old senior, and she dropped me off on her way to work each day so that I could be on a school TV program. On special days, we stopped at a grocery store for breakfast and shared warm baked goods in the front seat of her station wagon, laughing at each other as we wiped cinnamon sugar off our chins and envisioned what might happen in the future. Perhaps it's then that we forged a bond that didn't shatter on the rare occasions that my actions broke her heart and my words cut it to ribbons.

Or, maybe it was when I watched her care for her mother as Grandma was dying.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, because when we do our best, it's not necessary, Mommy always tells me, to worry about things we cannot change.

And I believe her, when she comes running out of the house, smiling that Mommy Smile and swearing she'll get rid of everything and move to Florida.

Because we have no regrets.

And no time to worry about such nonsense anyway.