Ronda Rich

Syndicated Columnist

Know this up front: This story won’t make me look like a saint, but God knows I’m not anyway, so I might as well laid the truth on the table.

Years before Tink and I married, I bought a three-acre parcel of land that adjoins the Rondarosa and because it faces a major highway – with two entrances — I was afraid it would be bought for a convenience store. Let me not fail to mention that it came with a double-wide trailer on it, one I planned to tear down.

Oh, if only I had. After the inspection, someone advised me to leave the trailer because a sweet, little woman lived there. Her tears convinced me to let her stay. This, I did.

The woman is sweet. It was her friends who were the trouble. One, in particular, named Shirley. Too many times I found her passed out from the copious drugs that filled her skinny body or half dead. Repeatedly, I threw her off the property or called the law.

“Let me tell you something,” I ranted once. “There’s not gonna be any drugs on this property that the Lord has blessed me with.” That day after I dragged her away, I thought she’d stay gone.

I was wrong. In the gloaming of a summer evening, I was sitting in the yard swing at Mama’s house, which adjoins that property, when I saw a shadowy figure dashing from one pine tree to another. I drove up there.

Sure enough, it was Shirley. Doped up.

“I thought I told you to stay off this property.”

The sweet, little woman said, “Miss Ronda, I told her she wasn’t s’ppose to be here.”

Shirley sniffled. “But I ain’t got nowhere to go.”

“Well,” I replied, void of sympathy. “You ain’t got here to go. Can someone come to get you.”

“My sister.” “Call her,” I replied. “Tell her you’ll be waiting on the road.”

I told you this story doesn’t make me look good. Don’t worry. It’s worse.

Months later, the sweet, little woman called. “Miss Ronda, my friend, Shirley, went to prison.”

“Shirley!” I exclaimed. “Shirley as in Shirley-I-called-the-law-on-many times, Shirley-as-in-I-drugher- old-the-property-repeatedly.

That Shirley?”

“Yes ma’am. She had an aneurysm and now she’s in prisonl” In this case “aneurysm” is code for “overdose.”

All I could think of was my newly found peace of mind. Before I could stop the words, they were in the air. “Good riddance.”

See, that’s the way of us mountain people – sometimes we just don’t have any good sense at all. Or decency.

All that aside, let me say this to the year of 2024: Good riddance.

It has been one of the hardest years of my life. I have grieved. I have cried. I have begged God for mercy. I have asked him to stop the death that rained like water brought by hurricanes. My precious Aunt Kathleen. The last person remaining who thought I was the best biscuit maker in the world. The husbands of two friends. And, perhaps, the hardest was one of my two best friends in the world: Walt Ehmer, 58, the chairman of Waffle House, who suffered with pancreatic cancer for 14 months before going to heaven.

In our last conversation, I prayed for him.

“I’ve never heard anyone who could pray like you,” he said weakly.

“That’s because I’m Baptist and you’re Catholic. Y’all memorize the same prayers. I just make mine up as I go.”

With little strength left, he chuckled. His last words were tell “Tell Tink ‘hi.’ I love you.”

At the visitation, his wife grabbed me tightly. “It’s important for you to know he REALLY loved you.”

That was the worse part of 2024, but there were other strains, sorrows and pains.

Let’s end on a good note: my newest Stella Bankwell mystery/ history book is a bestseller, this column added five more newspapers and we have two new sweet kittens.

Even a bad year can’t be all bad.