Look Before You Leap

Uncle Eli will have to stay in the hospital another week or so. He is the one who slid down the laundry chute and was mangled by junk lying at the end of his ride. Uncle Eli has a long history of bad decision making. There are too many stories to try to tell them all but one thing that always comes up when talking about Eli's goofs is the tale of how he got his first wife. She was a mail order bride. Eli had seen the movie Sayonara where Red Buttons married a sweet, pretty Japanese lady. Eli figured if it was good enough for Red it was good enough for him. He got right to work on it and within a year he had "bought" a bride from somewhere in Asia. In the movie we never found out how Red's marriage turned out because they did themselves in due to military policy against marrying someone from an occupied country. Eli's bride arrived and she was pretty all right, pretty old. They had lied about her age and put an old picture in their ad sheet. The bride was domineering and could not cook or keep their house clean. That marriage lasted a year. It was only with the help of Quince Applebutter, a real smart local lawyer, that he got out of that jam. He had to take a second mortgage on his farm to pay off the woman of his dreams. If it were not for Aunt Ethyl I am sure Uncle Eli would not have survived all his goofs. Tomorrow I'll tell how Ethyl came into the picture.

Tales of Harper, short stories and poems about the fictional town of Harper, Mississippi is available on Amazon Kindle