PAXTON PEOPLE: CONNIE EHRLINGER

Connie Ehrlinger lives in a nice brick house just outside Paxton, with her husband, two children and a fluffy little Pom named Cherie.   Connie favors Olive and mustard and butter yellow colours in her home and in her clothing, with quite a few outfits of well-cut slacks  with sleeveless paler blouses in the same shade of those foody colours which never really remind you of food.  She wears a narrow gold chain and tiny earrings, and always smells of Estee Beautiful and of Doublemint, which she’s been known to snap as she watches eagerly in conversation, ready for the next activity to be planned or to begin.   She “wants the most GO for her money,” and will hop right in with you for a trip to VP for bread, as quickly as to making a weekend of it at the Pepperell Outlet Stores.    

Connie steps right smartly around town in little leather shoes, loafers or sandals or wedges, according to the occasion, and has a nice Hamill-cut in the same shade of Clairol Strawberry Blonde she’s worn since 1986.  She likes  minimal makeup---just a little horizontal blush and a bronzey Clinique lipstick, and she’s on the go.

She has her kitchen laid out with exactly one of each item she might need, with a certain Tupperware especially for the Five-Cup she takes to Church Suppers, or one little handled pan for the box of “cornbread” Stove-Top she carries in her quilted blue “casserole toter” in cooler parts of the year.

   She does not have the Cookin’-Proud gene of her Mama Ole Mrs. Youngblood, nor her sister Carlisle, though they all do “favor” each other remarkably, with quick smiles to show their charmingly-overlapped canines, and the same interested hazel eyes. 

Unlike Carlisle, Connie is just a little bit ignorant of things---not a reader, doesn’t care for crafts or anything that takes a while to finish.   Her taste runs to The Bachelor and the whole gaudy gamut of Housewives and a lot of reality things like Pawn Shops and Hoarders.   House Hunters is the ne plus ultra, and HHI the creme---she has them on DVR back a couple of years, and once erased Varon’s whole collection of R. Lee Ermey, because the “box” was almost filled up.

Connie is a planner.   A new calendar gives her the same gentle thrill that a new tablet and pencil used to give Carlisle---a whole new blank world to hold her dreams.

  She keeps calendars and a daybook with precise notations of every event, appointment, anniversary date and practice, as well as the due date of every bill, renewal, or library book.  She has THAT kind of analytical mind---one which Keeps Up With Things, but which hasn’t much patience for news or any books beyond Taste of Home and Southern Living.   She’ll stand with one hand on her hip in the kitchen, looking days and weeks ahead at her calendar, shoving her gum forward in her mouth and stretching it around the tip of her tongue, reminiscent of the days when she actually DID blow the best bubbles in the schoolyard.

Then, she’ll grab a pen and her book, check off an item or two, notate a couple more, close the paper-laden book with the THONK finality of a job done, and place it with the several in the drawer of her little kitchen desk spot, all in the space of time it took to boil the water for the Minute Rice. 

  

Connie does everything this way, and that’s why she’s been secretary and/or Treasurer of every organization in town except the Masons and Lions.  She KEEPS UP.   Carlisle got the imagination and the words; Connie got the numbers and the ORDER.   And neither would change places with the other on a bet.