Tea with the Hughes. Interesting to say the least. Mindy. Melinda. I see now why she hasn’t left home. Mrs. Hughes is not well. She has some type of illness of the mind. There are things that she says that seem almost to make you think that she has it all together, then all of the sudden she is off on some tangent about her brother pulling her hair when she was a girl or the way the teller looked at her 20 years ago and then she begins throwing things! Then, just like that she is fast asleep. Melinda says its been like this for years. Since not too long after her dad passed 7 years ago. She said she felt as if she should of warned me before but wasn’t sure how to break the news so soon. And sometimes, she said, her mother will be fine as if everything is completely normal. Not today. She did start when I asked about Mr. Hughes. Perhaps her memory of him is a trigger for this behavior. I did ask Mindy about any new neighbors. She said there were a couple of “new” houses built in the past 14 years. Nothing though too close to our houses though. Someone had tried to build a home a bit deeper into the woods a few years back but never completed the project. I wanted to ask her about the giggle. I wanted to ask her about all of the giggles from our childhood. But then her mother started making a fuss. We were already on the porch, and it was getting late. She did say that she would call on me again. I look forward to it.
Edward Grayson Stone (Journal Entry 5)
