Once a month I pay two bills in town on the same day: the electric bill, and the insurance bill.

The electric bill is now two bills: the electric bill, and the fiberoptic internet bill.

A couple of years ago the legislature of Mississippi gave the electric co-ops the go-ahead to string fiber-optic cable and deliver high speed internet to us ya-hoo country mice.

We had our doubts. I mean, if the electric company can’t reliably keep the electricity on, what are the odds that they can keep the internet on? And sure enough, in the first week that we’d switch from AT&T fixed wireless internet to Co-op Internet (which is way faster), the internet went down three times.

The Guy at the Electric Co-op was seriously apologetic. He explained that they had a redundancy problem. They didn’t have a backup.

Anyhow, the Guy knows that we reinstated AT&T. For $60 extra each month, so we’d have a backup.

So I’m paying the electric & internet bills through the drive through, and I see the Guy. He comes outside and waves.

“Miss Bickle,” he says which is funny b/c there is no legal doc that identifies me as Bickle.

And he lets me know that they are now redundant. They have a back up plan.

We laugh. If a tree falls on your fiberoptic lines… .

Then I went to pay the insurance bill and learned about my neighbor’s health. He’s not doing well.

On the way back home, we saw a car down in the ditch. If you’re in the South, you know what I mean. There are areas that flood, and so the roads are like 5-6′ above ground level. We passed the car which at glance had a woman in a car in a ditch. We turned around. “Are you okay”

“Just taking pictures of the girls in the cotton field.”

God Bless America.