A Rose by Any Other Name

I see the Atlanta Braves are moving to a new stadium. I reckon it's time for that since the old one is about twenty years old. This got me thinking about Maureen Coon, a Harper woman who died a few years ago. Maureen, who pronounced her name Cone, was big on making things better by what she called them; kinda like that TV woman who pronounces her name, Bucket, as Boo-kay. Anyway, Maureen referred to the two-hundred seat Harper Football Field as the Harper Stadium. I reckon it don't matter but people kinda laughed behind her back at the way she talked. She referred to her Chevy as her Monte Carlo (this was correct, but a little pretentious) and she ate frankfurters, steak burgers, and feline fish. Her noon meals was lunch (everybody else called it dinner) and supper was only something late at night after dinner. She served tea every afternoon and was never seen in anything other than a dress.
Maureen was okay, but the rest of us didn't need wordplay to accept our humble lives. We played football on any piece of land that was flat and clear of animals or their droppings. And we marked off grassless clay ground with a stick to make a basketball court. I remember one guy excusing the loss of his team to a bunch of guy who drove up from McComb. He said, "We should have won and if the wind had not been blowing so hard we would have. It was just a bad luck day. We were one point behind and I got a break-away pass and was heading to a sure winning goal when I tripped over a root."
I reckon Maureen did bring a little color to out little town. God bless her.

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