Hill Country Living

“Animals killed on the highways during the past several weeks have been numerous and varied. On the early morning paper delivery route out to Sylva Rena Wednesday I saw a kill that is rare—a large hawk. I’m fairly sure someone lost a windshield in this encounter.

Coming into work Thursday morning I had to run over an armadillo, which had been killed by a car probably not far in front of me. I was meeting a vehicle so was unable to clear the critter. It felt like traveling over metal—I wasn’t ready for it to be so crunchy.’ –

Betty Shearer, Betty’s Week, August 29th, 2012.

A decade ago, while reading this exact six-line column intro in my kitchen on what I assumed would be a typical Wednesday morning, I became a Betty fan. This lady was funny!

Betty Shearer was special. She had the guts to write about her life on the front page of a newspaper every week. There’s no chance to delete or clarify in case of push-back. You have to publish to thousands of friends and strangers, be confident in it and stick to your guns – for at least a week. It takes as much guts to do that as it does commitment, the later quality of which she was clearly queen.

Until cancer made her too weak, Betty only missed writing one weekly column in 30 years. The high standard that sets is hard to articulate and my sole job here is to articulate. It’s really phenomenal. Plenty of times over the years I felt too busy, nervous or distracted with difficult life events to write my column but I knew that Betty would surely write hers. So, I bucked up. And even in the end while enduring cancer treatments, Betty provided son Jim with bits of directed column material. She just never stopped.

 I could write columns about Betty’s Week. She inspired me to start writing this column simply by writing hers. She took our seemingly mundane world and showed it to us in an honest, straight forward deadpan that was playful, appreciative and kind.

 Her columns had a rhythm, too! She typically addressed anything locally controversial in the first paragraph or two and cleared it all up in such a succinct and clear-headed manner as to unintentionally (maybe?) make the rest of us who were all worked up over the controversy seem long-winded and melodramatic. Betty had a chill-factor that came across as sensibly authoritative and it settled ruffled feathers.

Her listing of visiting friends and family usually followed wildlife/weather reports which were then closely followed up with meal and church reports. The power of a consistent column structure is a developed trait and each columnist will find their own. Betty’s column structure felt like a relaxed ride down a well-worn road with the windows down: easy-breezy and you knew when every hill was coming. In this case the hills are climactic lizard-killing stories and description of barbecue sandwiches.

 Betty’s greatest strength as a writer, in my opinion, was her mastery of the fragment. It seemed she could write entire columns made of sentences missing their subjects if she wanted; lines like “Delivered papers to SprintMart this morning” or “Visited Mom yesterday” abounded. Grammar need not apply to Betty. Why should it? The sentence subject is made clear in the title of her column – it’s Betty.

Unlike Betty, I don’t have a limitless word count so must end this devotion with still so much to say. Betty was iconic and remains so in her legacy at our newspaper.

Betty’s Week supplied a dependable anchor in a chaotic world and a testimony to the fact that, not matter what may come, the next seven days do still roll on – like sands through the hour glass, so are the weeks of our lives.