“I used to be a beauty queen,” said the waitress.

We were in Southern Mississippi. The waitress was older. Maybe in her 70s. Which is getting younger every year.

The woman brought my breakfast and my coffee. The food was hot. The coffee was the temperature of three-day-old bathwater.

“A beauty queen?” I said.

“Yeah,” the waitress said. “Won a local beauty contest when I was 24, I thought I was going to die of shock. Hadn’t never won nothing in my whole life.”

She had no confidence as a young woman. She grew up on a farm with six brothers. The only girl in a family of nine.

“My brothers were always trying to steal my food.”

She learned to work hard, how to bale hay, and how to handle large animals. You can always tell someone who has handled large animals. They don’t make sudden movements.

As a girl, she never thought she was pretty. She grew up in overalls and bare feet. Her mother cut her hair, and her daddy said she’d make a fine farmer’s wife.

“Then my aunt Jeannie came along,” she said. “My aunt said I should enter this beauty contest. And I was like, ‘What? Me? I’m ugly.’”

But her aunt insisted.

Her aunt took her into town to get her hair did. The older ladies in the salon wore helmet hair and pink nylon capes. They swarmed her like bees.

“They put so much hairspray on me I think I was an environmental hazard.”

The ladies did her makeup. They plucked her eyebrows. They did her eyelashes. They applied powder, rouge, and a gallon of base.

“I didn’t even recognize myself.”

The contest was a foreign experience. She felt like a fish out of the pond.

“My aunt told me to walk like Marilyn Monroe, and to speak on the microphone like Queen Elizabeth.”

The young woman won the contest. It was a unanimous vote. One of the biggest days of her life.

“Every time I had a bad day, I kept going back to that contest in my mind. I’d tell myself, ‘You’re a beauty queen, you got this.’”

She got married. She had four kids. Her husband was in sales, and farmed on the side. She was in food service.

Life was not easy.

“I got cancer when I was 47, the doctors told me I could die. I had to get cut up, and they gave me a mastectomy. When I came home, I cried so hard because you don’t feel like a woman after a mastectomy.”

But her husband said, “Sweetie, you’re still prettier than every woman in Jackson County, and you have the title to prove it.”

When the cancer came back at age 52, she had to undergo more chemo, more radiation. She became gaunt and pale. Her hair fell out.

One night she came home from treatment, sick as a dog. Her whole family was waiting for her on the porch. Her kids and her husband.

They’d found her old sash and her tiara in the attic. They held a mock ceremony. They crowned her Miss Mississippi.

“I cried and cried.”

They told her she would beat this. Because she was strong. And beautiful. And she did beat it.

And today, she waits tables. Not because she has to, but because she likes to keep busy.

“I always tell people they’re beautiful whenever I can,” she said. “Because just knowing and believing that God made you beautiful makes you stronger than you ever knew you could be.”

This columnist wishes to add nothing more to that remark.