SAMPIE

GEORGIA FOLK AND FARM LIFE - What can I tell you about our old buddy Sampie? I reckon you would say he's a good ole boy, Everybody likes Sampie, he is easy going, and easy to like. He is no towering intellect, and he ain't dumb either, sort'a right there in the middle...I mean the lower part of the middle. That is one reason Sampie is a good friend, he never tries to argue with anybody, he thinks on what he's thinking and keeps most things he thinks of to himself. Sampie is a good listener, well, maybe the best listener ever, yep, if anybody needed a good listener to hire, Sampie would be the man. He's a bit of a loner, but if you see Sampie he's most likely sitting down talking to somebody. It's just the most natural thing in the world to sit and talk to Sampie, if someone ain't chewin' his ear, it means somebody has just left off talking to Sampie, and another friend is about to take up the mantle.

I reckon when I called him a loner, I meant when he is at home, he has some that come sit and visit with him, most times on the porch, but only a select few are privy to his backyard, and to the critters he keeps. Sampie is a natural-born caretaker, he picks up stray critters and cares for them, and his chickens, mostly bantams, as well as the pigeons his daddy kept, and of course he looked after them too, now. He almost always had a few rescued bunnies, broke-wing birds, and even a crippled squirrel. He picked up looking after his daddy when his mama died, his old man had a stroke or two and Sampie's mama looked after him and wouldn't hear any talk of putting him in the nursing home, no matter how many judged it a pretty good place. She whuttin' having any such talk. She was a good woman and old fashioned, I know she didn't look after her old man over any great, true love, they got on fine I reckon but he was not an easy man at all. She took good care of him on account of having been raised right. Sampie always helped when she needed him to pick up his daddy and move him, but Sampie's ma had mastered the art of bathing and dressing her old man, all by herself, when need be.

She was strong and knew how to shift his weight and hers, to good effect, and would nudge here with a knee, and pry this way and that, and have him dressed before you knew it, it was plumb entertaining to watch. Sampie was a strong boy, always was, and he could just treat his poor ole daddy like a sack of potatoes, picking him up and make short shrift of it all. He was gentle with his daddy, again, not out of an abiding love for the old man, now he did love his daddy, but only as far as you could love one like his daddy was. He took good care of him, because like his mama before him, he was raised right. Sampie was an only child, and it suited him fine. His old man followed suit and died about two years after Sampie's mama. Sampie got what the old folks had left behind, the house and a few acres right on the edge of town, just out of the city limit, and more money than most folks would have guessed, that they had in the bank.

Oh, let's get back to that crippled squirrel, I almost hate to tell of it, but, some stories just demand the telling, so ya don't just bust for keeping them in. The squirrel had...(to be continued)

~A short story by Wade Peebles