Washing Town Folks

Last week we had a visit from some kid who said he works for one of those agencies in Washing Town. We could tell right off he was lying. Those soft little hands have never seen, much less held, a hoe or plow handles. He might get paid for being somewhere, but he shore hasn’t worked.

The Stump County Chronicles are a satire about an imaginary county located in rural Virginia. Stump County, population 999, is filled with imaginary people who are struggling with real life problems as they attempt to move into the 20 century. The writer, Half Whitt, is imaginary. He works for the imaginary newspaper, The Sneezeville Sentinel.
Trying to contact Half Whitt? Send letters to editor@southsidemessenger.com, or mail to The Southside Messenger, P.O. Box 849, Keysville, VA 23947 and we’ll pass it along!

He seems real proud that his agency is a non-profit; but he says he gets paid. It sounds strange to us. If you are getting paid to do something and you aren’t helping them make money, you aren’t earning what you get.

He says a non-profit isn’t supposed to make money, it is supposed to help folks. If he believes that, don’t you think he would volunteer instead of expecting to get paid? The only business in Stump County that makes any money is Ludd’s Local Likkers and Libations. Well, Ludd would make some money if everybody didn’t run a tab. Then again, once one of the revenuers shows up and finds Ludd’s still, he’ll be shut down again.

Anyway, that city kid says he is going to help everybody in the county winterize their homes. First off, nobody would let him inside; our homes are cold enough without him winterizing them. Then he explained what he was going to do was try to keep the cold out and the heat in. Why didn’t he just say so?

Those of us at The Sentinel were pretty excited. What everyone around here does is tack old newspapers to the walls to keep out the wind. We could see that kid buying hundreds of papers and helping folks put them up. Maybe we could even add some color pictures so it would look better. The only problem is that Stump County is so far behind the rest of the country, the whole county is still in black and white.

The first time that kid made a trip to an outhouse, he came running out with his shirttail flappin. We thought he had seen his first snake or spider or maybe had disturbed a wasp nest. I’ve never seen a kid that excited. He jumped in that fancy car and left. We didn’t expect to ever see him again.

He showed up again yesterday with a whole truckload of money. Seems that what got him excited was the bucket of corncobs and the Sears catalog in the outhouse. He went back to Washing Town and picked up a load of that stimulus money.

Then he came by the Sneezeville Sentinel Office and asked us to take a picture and run a story with a headline “Stump County Gets One Million Dollars for Toilet Paper.”

Frankly, none of us are very impressed. Corncobs are better for rough work and the Sears Catalog is better for everything else as long as you throw away the colored pictures. We don’t like to waste stuff so we’ll use those bills but all of us will be glad when it is gone.