“The Girl from Silver Creek,” a book of short stories from a girl native to the Lawrence County community, has recently been published. The author, 83-year-old Doris Gracia, said writing the book took only about a year.

“At the time I wrote them I didn’t write them to try and sell them to anybody, I just wrote them because they came to mind,” Gracia said. “I just love to sit down. I sit down and type my stories.”

As the title would suggest, many of the stories center around her time living in Silver Creek and the surrounding areas.

“I spent from the time I was about 10 years old until I was about 25 in Silver Creek. When my daddy died, (mom) bought her home in Monticello and moved there. But I still remember a lot of things in Silver creek that was really funny. It’s a really small town, but there’s a lot of things that happened,” she said.

Some of them take place out of state as well. In “Ants Ants Ants,” Gracia said in her book that she lived in New Orleans. She would work late as a registered nurse at a hospital on State Stree. When she returned home around midnight, there was a week-long period where a neighbor would park in her spot on the road. It was a public road, so she couldn’t make him move, but she came up with a unique way to encourage him.

“There was an ant pile of the meanest ants in Louisiana about three feet from his car,” Gracia wrote. “What did I do? Well I went in my kitchen and got the Karo syrup — diluted in water just enough to squirt out of my squirt bottle. That night when I came in from work, I squirted that thick sweet solution between the cracks where the door closes and left a heavy trail to the nearby ant bed.”

Needless to say, Gracia got her parking space back.

“It’s got a whole bunch of funny stories in there. There’s a couple in it about Brookhaven,” Gracia said. “I worked as a registered nurse at King’s Daughters Hospital a long time ago. We had this orderly, and Lord have mercy — he was a good orderly but he would talk, talk talk. He would talk your ears off. The one thing I was always taught you don’t talk about is politics, death, sex and religion. But he would talk about it and talk about it.”

This is touched on in the short story, “Funeral Home Faux Pas.” Gracia wrote that the orderly had a brother that died in an accident while running moonshine. Gracia was asked to attend. When she got to the funeral home, she noticed that the orderly was not there.

“Everyone looked at me like, ‘Who are you?’,” Gracia said. “Someone told me to help myself to the food.”

The food was good, Gracia said, but something didn’t seem right. She had gone to the wrong funeral home.

“I excused myself as politely as anyone in my predicament could,” Gracia wrote. “No one told me there was more than one funeral home in that little town.”

To read these stories and more, Gracia’s book can be found on lulu.com.