"I'm Just Seefin'"
                                                      Whatchya doin,' Honey Doola?
                                                                         Oh, I'm just seefin,' Uncle Frank.

"Whatchya doin'?" they used to ask my mother when she was a child. "I'm seefin,'" she'd say. "I was just seeing how things are, that's seefin," she explained to me, a child sitting up in bed, home from school with chicken pox or was it measles. But it wasn't until I was much older that she told me about being called Honey Doola that's how I said my name Helen Julia at age five when her own mother died and she was shuffled around the Canadian-Vermont border, too shy to speak.

Two old men came to fetch me at the Orlando airport. One wore a patch over one eye. (He could only drive one way, I joked later to everyone who asked how I arrived.) The other was my father. Heading South on Highway 27, rushing to my mother's bedside, I listened to reports of rapes and murders and kidnappings, about how one woman who escaped to a lake hung her fingers so long to a cement piling they were "skinned like a fish, can you imagine?" the man with the patch said to me.  Things aren't the same, my father agreed.

When we turned at the faded sign "WELCOME TO SUN RAY HOMES, where some of the nicest people live, " I noticed a new sign had been added: " WARNING. Neighborhood Crime Watch."

Then we pulled into where my mother was ailing and I got out of the car and ran up the front walk and opened the door.

"Whatchya doin'?" my mother inquired from her nest on the couch.

"Oh, I'm just seefin,'" I smiled, turning back the time.





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