No one wants to get that phone call — the one that tells you that a good friend has died, even as you were carrying on your everyday routine of work, gym, home (house) work. I got that phone call this past week when I heard a voice tell me tearfully that my friend Irene Smith had passed away.
What a special friend she was. I have known her since I came to Athens, when I represented the city and university for Historic Heartland, one of the state’s tourism divisions. Irene was the cheerleader for Covington and Newton County, but she and I we figured that, really, we represented the whole area, indeed, the whole state. We had fine times spreading he news of Georgia’s beautiful landscapes and friendly hamlets, and we visited places as small as Roberta and as grand as Atlanta. We learned so much about our part of the state and we relished it, even the views of the noxious kudzu and the despised English ivy.
Irene loved to have guests to her home, and, in the South of her youth, one did not entertain without good food and strong drink. And she delivered, both along with — always — a helluva good time. She had a couple of TV shows on cooking and authored several cookbooks; on the back of one, about “sassy cooking,” she used photographs of me and Jeff Lewis, at that time director of the State Botanical Garden.
Once when I asked her how to make cream of crab soup, she said, “just use the recipe for she-crab soup.” I replied, “how do you tell a she-crab from a he-crab?” And she replied, “of all the men I’ve ever known, you’ve the only one to ever ask me that, and I just don’t know. Do you think folks in Charleston know? They better.”
Irene loved life and her family more than anything. Certain things were special to her, like the color blue. One time when I gave her a Flow blue plate, she asked me what my favorite color was. “Yellow,” I said. “Yellow?,” she answered. “Yellow? That’s not a color. That’s a condition.”
And what else did she love? Covington, her hometown. Brenau College, where she was a Zeta. The University of Georgia and Georgia football. The State Botanical Garden.
Irene planned her memorial and entombment and she intended for people to remember first of all, her love of life and her love of Georgia, and second that memory is prayer. As the preacher said at her service, “Who but Irene would plan a funeral at 5 p.m. on Sunday afternoon? I missed my golf game.”
I was thinking so many good things about Irene as I drove from Athens to Covington. I took the back way and meandered through Bostwick, Rutledge, even Social Circle. It was a cool day and I turned off the air conditioning and “let” the window down, as we say in Alabama. I reveled in the beauty of the day, the loveliness — the greenness — of rural Georgia and its heartland. And every mile I drove, every thought, was of Irene, and I said to myself more than once, “Thank you, Irene, for this beautiful day. Bless you.”
Authored by:
William U. Eiland
