Image by ANDRI TEGAR MAHARDIKA from Pixabay
“OK, I am officially done with this – I love you, Cousins Harry and Maggie, but I need Papa and Grandma back here – can't they just email themselves home or something?”
“Edwina, how are you going to hug and snuggle with a digital human?”
“Oh, right, you can't sit in the lap of an e-mail – as you were, cousins, as you were.”
Cousin Harry, also known as Col. H.F. Lee, having been dismissed in such a way by his eight-year-old cousin Edwina Ludlow, had to go into the house and laugh.
“If that child is not the spiritual heir of Grandee Lee, I don't know who is!”
Among the Lees-of-the-Mountain, if you asked for about a century who the Lee most like General R.E. Lee was in that branch of the family, a woman's name increasingly rose to the top: Hilda Lee, daughter of Horatio Lee, great-grand-niece of that said R.E. Lee, and with every inch of his commanding manner combined with her mother's straightforward Scottish manner – a Highland general of Virginia in a woman, in essence. Her great-granddaughter Edwina was her miniature … and so Col. Lee called her Grandee Leedlow, rolling laughing because there were so many incidents with his great aunt Hilda that she kept reminding him of.
“So, Maggie, what happened was that one of my cousins borrowed some tools from Aunt Hilda and was late getting them back. The minute she started demanding where he was with her tools, it was go time for the rest of us, because you know there are no landlines way up there to say nothing of email having been invented, so we had to find him before she did! I was there when Cousin Luke told the offender, 'Look, cuz, slide down this slope here and roll a few times! Get really messed up so you have an excuse and keep your mouth shut when I find you later, because you need an excuse – what were you thinking? You know Aunt Hilda doesn't play about her things!”
“She don't play about hers – why does that sound familiar?” Mrs. Maggie Lee said before she joined her husband in laughing.
“So, the offender did as he was told, and Cousin Luke found him and did the talking, and all Aunt Hilda said was, “If y'all had the fear of God, and knew 'thou shalt not steal' and 'thou shalt not bear false witness' included losing my tools after having them for three months and then making up a stupid story, then you wouldn't have to deal with the Fear of Hilda, but since y'all don't want to get the first one, you just gonna hafta get the second one!”
“Aunt Hilda broke bad!” Mrs. Lee said.
“You already know!” Col. Lee said. “Cousin Hoppy and I were all, 'yeah, we're good on all that, let's go read the Bible and fear God and do His commandments, because –.' ”
Mrs. Lee fell onto the sofa laughing, and then got up and started cracking up all over again with her husband because just outside …
“Look,” the spiritual heir of Grandlee Lee was saying to her elder brother ten-year-old Andrew Ludlow, “I pay attention to the reruns and I know they've had transporter beams since the 1960s, since they put guys on the moon – I'm not trying to hear that this can't be done!”
Andrew was unflappably calm, the other side of the Lee personality he inherited from that same Hilda Lee.
“The first problem is that Star Trek: The Original Series was fiction, and so for the moon landing they actually had to put Mr. Armstrong and the rest in a rocket and fly them to the moon like it says in that Frank Sinatra song Papa likes to sing in bass for Grandma.”
“Well, it's been fifty years – somebody has to have figured it out – what are you reading on a eleventh grade level now for anyway if you can't find where they've figured it out!”
“Theoretical physics is college-level stuff, Eddie, and Papa and Grandma will be home before I can read up that high.”
“Aw, man! Look, somebody gotta take care of this!”
“Well, I'm not as big as Papa, but, you can have a hug.”
“Well … OK … big brother hugs are nice too.”
Their big Lee cousins came and joined the embrace, and after that, it was all better.
“Grandee Lee was the way she was because, like with many people, the hard side of her was brought out because of the life she had to navigate, but she also was a very kind and loving person,” Col. Lee said. “I think that if Edwina just gets a chance to heal, she can lean more to that side.”
“I think so, too,” Cousin Maggie said. “She calmed right down. There's a lot of trauma there, but I think she'll make it if we all work together.”