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259 SALLY AND CHANCE: AN UNUSUAL LOVE STORY by Sheila Morris  If you spend time in a small town in Texas, you can be pretty sure you’ll meet a storyteller or two and be thoroughly entertained with gossipy tales about town politics and politicians, or a hurricane that blew through a few years ago, or the high school football team that won state, or the best game the Aggies and Longhorns ever played, or what happened to the Cowboys when an Arkansas boy named Jerry Jones bought them, or why in the world the Houston Oilers had to move to Tennessee. Most likely you’ll find out who has the best chicken fried steak and hamburgers in town, and the name of the newest Mexican food restaurant that’s run by authentic Hispanics and not one of those dagnabit chains. For sure, the numberone topic in every small town in southeast Texas in the summer of 2011, however, was the drought, as in no rain. Not a drop for weeks. Record triple-digit temperatures for days and no rain to cool off anything or anybody. And so on. My listening ear was almost on autopilot and I could nod my head at appropriate intervals and tsk! tsk! about the weather with the best of them. And then I met Sally, and no, my name isn’t Harry. Sally woke me up with a real Texas love story. Good storytellers can appear in the strangest places and at the most unexpected times, and this one was no exception. My friend Carol and I drove over to Tomball, a small town between our home town of Montgomery and Houston, the giant behemoth of a city forty miles southeast of us. We both took items to be framed because Carol said she knew the best frame shop in the county and it was in Tomball. She knew the woman and her husband who ran the shop and vowed they were the best framers in the business. Well, that was good enough for me. Carol was a reliable resource for all things artsy craftsy antiquey and anything in between. When we entered the little shop, I saw it was an art gallery as well as a frame shop, but I wasn’t surprised because many retail stores combine the two, particularly in a town the size of Tomball with its population of 9,089. I could also see right away I would love the unpretentious shop, because much of the art displayed on the walls and scattered about on easels was Texana. You know what I mean: cowboys and cows, boots and spurs, horses, Indian chiefs— all the nostalgic western images that made Texans, both native and transplanted, believe they remembered who they were. You either got it and liked it or didn’t get it and made fun of it. I got it. The shop was empty except for Sally and her husband Bill. The first thing I noticed about this woman was her hair. She had big hair, as we used to say when we described my Aunt Thelma’s signature beehive hairdo or the coiffures of the women who attended the Pentecostal Holiness Church. Sally’s suspiciously colored reddish blonde white hair was swept up and back and appeared to be longer than it probably was. Regardless, it was big and suited the woman who greeted us with a smile the same size as her hair. She exchanged pleasantries with Carol, who introduced me to Sally and Bill and explained our mission. We had brought our assortment of pictures and posters and prints in with us, and Sally escorted us to the back of the shop where we could lay them out to be measured and matched with mats and frames. Bill disappeared into his work room. Carol told me to go first with my things and I began to put a few pictures on the counter top in front of Sally, who sat down and reached for her measuring tape. But then, she seemed to lose interest in the job ahead of her and launched into a monologue about the heat that summer. And could we believe it? Lightning struck her air conditioning unit at her house earlier that week and she and Bill had been without cool air for two days and nights. The first night they turned on all the fans they could find and toughed it out, but the last night she had looked at Bill...

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