Camelias

I'm sure this will be the first of many stories about my beloved maternal grandmother Mimi and her equally loved sister Trudy, who lived together in Fayetteville, North Carolina, for as long as I can remember.

I went to college at Wake Forest University, not quite three hours away in Winston-Salem, and whenever I had a 3-day weekend, I would drive down to Fayetteville with Mark Holt, the son of Mimi's preacher. I never even did the trip-to-Florida thing for Spring Break; I would always stay with Mimi and Trudy, who were so often referred to together, that years later, my brother-in-law Steve nicknamed them the "Snoop Sisters."

My Uncle Buddy (Mom's younger brother), his wife Betty Jo, and their kids Melissa and Charles lived around the corner and a block away from Mimi and Trudy. After the camelias bloom, which is happening right now, by the way, Betty Jo would clean the fallen blossoms in her yard and then help Mimi and Trudy with theirs - I will always remember how Mimi and Trudy loved those fragrant creamy white blooms and their dogwood trees.

Well, evidently, if the camelia blooms stay on the ground too long they can cause a blight on the plant - hence an almost constant picking up of camelia blossoms this time of year.

The ladies were out picking the flowers off the ground and Trudy got tired of leaning down, so she got one of those trigger-controlled-grip-extension-device things - for a writer, don't you love my descriptive capabilities? - that you can use to retrieve items such as cannned goods from an upper shelf. After a while, Trudy got tired of picking up camelia blossoms even without having to bend over, so she proceded to pick the unopened buds off the bushes. Such was Trudy. No beating around the bush. And, no, I did not write this just for that pun. It just sort of blossomed.