| ARTICLE
If you stumble into the hidden closes of some persons you are surprised
sometimes by the skeletons that rattle or grin at you.
Some are tragic like the Dallasite who, when a friend came to get money he had
left for safe keeping, shot. Some are funny in the distance of the years,
such as the venerated, deceased Dallasite who once rode a horse down Main Street
attired in a blue ribbon. And some reflect the ear, such as that of Aunt Ida of
Garland, formally known as Mrs. Peter Handley.
A pillar of church and town is Aunt Ida, a small lady of 80 who looks younger
and seems to have stepped out of a bandbox. She makes people like Mrs. W. H.
Bradfield, who helps her husband run the Garland News, marvel, for Aunt Ida hand
paints and sells ice tea glasses and china, makes beautiful hooked rugs people
come from miles to buy and writes poetry for her own amusement. She organized
Garland's first women's club, the Woman's Study Club, and the first garden club,
a charter member of the State Federation.
Yet, once she was nearly disgraced.
That was when she was brown-haired, blue-eyed Miss Ida Nix. The year was 1883,
she lived on the headright her grandfather had located east of Carrollton in
1845 and she was 17 and marriageable. In fact, she was grown at 15 and her
voluminous skirts swept the ground, never, never doing such an immodest thing as
exposing an ankle. When horseback, she always rode sidesaddle as did every lady
with a skirt that ran to the toes and was so voluminous that in a wind it would
never expose a lady's lines. Certainly not.
Thus the background for that spring Saturday of '83 when the mud trail to Dallas
had dried the flour in the Nix barrel was down toward the bottom and there was
only an inch of coffee beans in the tow sack, the green coffee beans they
parched and ground. David Nix and wife had elected that day to go to Dallas and
replenish the supply. Since Harrison Nix, 20, her older brother, had already
gone to Carrollton, Ida would keep the children and the place.
David Nix drove the wagon up to the stile by the west side of the two-story
white house that was built in 1875, that is occupied this day by Mrs. Harrison
Nix. There are still some of the cedars in the yard that David Nix dug up down
by Cedar Hill, replanted and kept trimmed in balls, a big one at the bottom, a
smaller at top, the smaller ones the cardinals built nests in and sat atop like
flashes of fire.
As Mrs. Nix crossed over the stile by a big bois d'arc tree, Nix called with
additional instructions. "And Ida watch the bees, They might swarm."
Miss Ida nodded and glanced at the twenty-odd white hives westward in the
orchard near the first alfalfa field in the county, the alfalfa the bees loved.
Then she and the smaller children waved good-by, Minnie, 13, now Mrs. Tom Moore
of Cisco; Myrtle, 9, now Mrs. J. E. Southerland of Sulphur, Okla., and little
Ethel, 3, now Mrs. H. B. Fisher of Dallas.
The wagon rumbled off along the rough ruts and Miss Ida went about her work.
Some time later one of the younger children, probably Minnie, came running.
"Ida! Ida! The bees'r swarmin'." Miss Ida's long skirts swished through the
house and ot the west side.
The bees certainly were swarming. There had been too many in one hive. A
migration was under way to a new home, and a yellow, lower limb of the bois
d'arc by the stile had a great, brown blob, a blob that would scare, if not
sting, the daylights out of a visitor.
And during that day, Saturday, when the rural young men rode into Carrollton, it
was likely that Miss Ida might have a visitor. Yes, very likely. Why did
Harrison have to go off ? And her father, too ? She had seen them
handle bees, and it was not a young lady's work. However, those bees might be
lost if not soon hived.
Miss Ida then, as is Aunt Ida now, was of sturdy stuff, the granddaughter of a
pioneer of 1845. And she decided to do something about it. A bold something,
bolder than many an outright hussy.
Watch the bees, she told Minnie, keep Myrtle and Ethel safe. She hurried into
the house, to Harrison's room. She closed the door tight. Then she put on
his old hat with the bee screen, then his coat. Then she got - and her face
reddened - an old pair of his pants. Hurried, she got into them, snatched his
heavy gloves, and went back outside.
"Ooh," giggled Myrtle, "lookit ...." then suddenly froze at Ida's eyes.
The bees were still there, so she ran to the barn, got a new hive, set it on top
the stile, then got a saw and a table. She put the table under the trees and =
most unladylike - climed the tree. Gently, she began sawing at the limb; gently,
but just as fast as she could. Suppose someone saw here ! Oh !
She was half way through the limb, stopped a moment and - Clippety-clop!
Clippety-clop! Up the road from Carrollton was coming a horse !
Should she freeze! Or get down and run !
Clippety-clop ! Clippety-clop ! The horse and horseman came into view. She was
caught. What if he saw an ankle! What if he saw her in pants!
The horseman rode up, a young horseman, as she pulled that hat down, far down,
Thank goodness it was big. The horseman stopped near the stile. "Hel-lo," he
called to the children and figure in the tree. "Is Miss Ida to home?"
Miss Ida whispered out of a corner of her mouth to Myrtle, et al, "Shhhhh.... if
you so much as whisper I'll ...." Then down deep she pulled up a muffled croak,
a croak she hoped sounded like a hired man.
"She's not here," she lied, just like Lady Godiva would have lied had you asked
her name as she rode by. "She's gone to town."
The horseman went back down the road as Miss Ida sawed furiously. She sped that
limb down, held i tnear the empty hive and the bees nicely went in. Then she
hurried upstairs, slid out of those terrible pants and sighed deeply.
Her reputation was saved.
The Dallas Morning News - December 10, 1946
Submitted by Edward Lynn
Williams
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