Nola's Story

      I'm moving to a new house soon and going through a lot of photos and clippings. Sorting and wrapping, packing and tossing. I ran across a news story originally printed in November of 2010 that told of a man frozen to death in his pick-up truck in Nevada. It brought to mind a story I heard decades ago, told to me by my late father, so I can bet the event is sixty, maybe seventy years old. A woman named Nola was a close family friend for many years. She was a younger sister of my dad's stepfather Roy Farmer. She'd even introduced my Uncle Edward to a pretty southern girl name Agnes. The two eventually married. 

     Well, one day Nola's husband went out to get the newspaper or mail. It was winter and they lived in the woods. He didn't come back. She waited. Come evening she called relatives and friends who searched the forest and town, and contacted people he might know. There was no sign of him. Sometimes back in those days a man would just walk out and never come back, even if his wife thought everything was going well; most times to take up with a floozy in another town. Nola figured that must have been the case and mourned the loss of her man, missing him dearly. Well, along came the spring thaw and at the end of April her dogs were out for quite some time. She called to them and they came trotting in, carrying some fairly large bones in their jaws. At first she thought the remains were from a deer, but some other people at her home figured otherwise and followed the dogs into the deep woods. Her husband was resting, his back to a large tree. The dogs had removed his leg bones. Had Nola's husband stopped to rest? Had he felt ill and fell to the cold ground? All anyone knew with some certainty was that the man just froze to death out there. 

(Art by Emil Grimm)