MISENHEIMER — She’s gone. Left this morning. But she’ll be back.
Nobody at Pfeiffer University doubts that.
Nell Smith will drive up one day in her truck camper looking as unlikely as she did when she came in May, with Bill, that lazy no-good, napping beside her, and everybody will rush to give her a hug and tell her how empty it’s been since she left.
Maybe she’ll come in October to see the leaves. You don’t see leaves turn where she lives on Amelia Island, the last barrier island going south off the coast of Florida.
Or maybe she’ll come just to see everybody who’s become addicted to a 71-year-old woman who’s probably the smallest and oldest student ever enrolled at Pfeiffer on the Misenheimer campus.
Another 71-year-old was in the masters program on the Charlotte campus, and a 77-year-old audited a course.
But Nell, who’d never been to college, made an A on the education course she took and “Super” on her portfolio, and “everybody at Pfeiffer,” says Elsie
Lowder, admissions director, “fell in love with her because she’s so herself.”
Of course, nobody could help noticing her. She’s a tiny, little thing, way under 5 feet and likely weighs less than 90 pounds but moves — and talks — 90 miles an hour, like she was doing the day she walked into the admissions office to enroll in a course.
She and Bill were living in her camper beside the wonderful little old maid’s house she bought in Gold Hill because it had to be cleaned up to get it ready to rent.
Finding it was a miracle.
She wanted a small house near her son, T.J., who lives in Concord, but not too near so she won’t get in his way.
And near a railroad track because her husband, Tommy, was a railroad station agent before he died. And a store and a church because she won’t move here till she’s too old to drive, and she’ll need a store and a church she can walk to.
But fixing up that little house couldn’t fill all her hours, so she enrolled in a course not to waste her time.
“I don’t want my brain to go to mush,”she told Elsie.
Well, she got that house clean, flitting around like a little butterfly, and worried she’d fail but got an A-minus and her Pfeiffer professor Ann Bennett called her “a perfect example of lifelong learning.” Now she can’t wait to start her job as a substitute teacher when she gets back to Florida.
“I count it all as blessings of the Lord,” she says. Sometimes she can’t help telling Him, “If you give me many more good blessings, I just don’t know what I’ll do.”
He blessed her with love.
“I stammered,” she says. “I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn’t say it. And I had one droopy eye. But the best looking man and the best person in the world married me. And my son was born, and I started talking. I don’t know why.”
But that’s why she’s going to be a substitute teacher in Florida — to help kids with learning disabilities get over the hump. “When a kid has an impairment, that can ruin him for life if it’s not taken care of.”
But she and Bill will be back.
Bill?Oh, he’s a stuffed plaid shirt with a stuffed stocking head covered with a cap pulled down over his face like he’s sleeping so nobody will think that little old lady is
traveling alone.
Contact Rose Post at 704-797-4251 or rpost@salisburypost.com
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