For the Love of Mud

Every now and then I think of someone from my past, someone that I remember because of their effect on my life back then. One of these people is Maysue Ripples, a pretty young woman, who went to the church I was brought up in. Maysue was known in all the night spots in the counties that surrounded Harper. She made the rounds. Men would see her on the street and whistle or hoot out her name. She would drop her head and keep walking on. The strange thing is every Sunday she would be at church and at the end of the service when they gave the invitation for sinners to come down and proclaim their allegiance to the true faith, Maysue would be the first one down. She would stand before the group and bawl out her submission to their ways. But the next Saturday night, from all accounts I heard, she would be back in the honky-tonks, back to her old ways. I heard one old man say, "You can wash up a sow, but you can't keep her from going back in the mud." Finally, the church gave up on Maysue and asked her not to return. Then she disappeared from Harper. I never heard news of her after that point. Of course, their were rumors: She ran off with a tent preacher (like my third wife did), she was in New Orleans working as a stripper, she jumped in the Bogue Chitto River and drowned and her body was lying on the bottom of Lake Pontchartrain. Someone even claimed they saw her in a "B" movie from Hollywood. To this day, I wonder about Maysue. Did she decide which path she would trod and leave the other path behind? Or is she still out there bouncing back and forth between the shower and the mud?