My Neighbor Ellie

I had a neighbor once that you wouldn't believe. These are some memories this poor soul who was born on April Fool's day and was buried on April Fool's day seventy years later.

One day, Ellie came into my kitchen, opened my cupboard doors and began searching for food. She explained why she was doing this. She said she had just gotten company and she had nothing in the house to give them to eat. Well, my cupboard didn't yield anything for her to feed her guests, so she went home empty-handed and probably disgusted, and I just stood there in wonderment.

Ellie was deathly afraid of lightning! Ellie had a deep faith in the goodness of God, but she constantly feared that He was going to strike her down sooner or later.

One afternoon I was having coffee with my mother and an aunt in my kitchen hardly noticing that there was a teeny bit of lightning in the western sky. Ellie comes to my house, figuring she

would be safer at my house than in her own home. So I invited her to have a cup of coffee, but she said, "No, I'm going to sit on the steps that lead upstairs". So while we gabbed and drank our coffee, Elly sat alone on the stairs. After about half an hour she came back into my

kitchen looking very upset. "You people should have come and sat on the stairs with me!" she

barked and left. That was Ellie!

Ellie found it hard to part with anything she owned. Even her garbage. What she could part with, she would put in a cardboard box, tie it with string and place it on the flat bed of her husband's truck. And her husband would then put it where it belonged. She couldn't even part with her junk mail. She had a table in her living room that became the storage area for her junk mail. The mail was piled high on this table. I might mention that her kitchen table was also piled high with stuff. I might mention that her bathtub was also piled high with cleaning supplies which she seldom used, but she couldn't resist another Stanley home party.

If Ellie bought a new piece of furniture like a couch, she just couldn't get rid of the old couch, so

she would put the new couch in front of the old couch. The same with a console TV. One TV in

front of the other. Her decorated Christmas tree stayed up until sometime in April. It finally got to the point where there was only a narrow path through her living room. She'd invite us neighbors in for coffee and served us using the seat of a wooden kitchen chair as a table.

Ellie smoked cigarettes. That's what killed her. It wasn't getting struck by lightning after all.

The strange thing was----everybody liked Ellie. I know I did.