‘At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book – that string of confused, alien cyphers – shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.’
-Alberto Manguel-
Do you remember?
The story goes that she drove by a house with a chimney fire. She stopped to tell the people and found a single dad raising a teenage daughter. This was in the late 1940s. She ended up staying as a housekeeper for grandpa and raised mom. There are underlying whispers of other stories. That there might have been more going on between Aunty and grandpa. That they might have married except for his heavy drinking. The nights when he would be drunk, yelling at mom and Aunty and throwing slices of bread across the table at them.
Mom’s wedding. Grandpa in the suit, Aunty on far right.
She said she was Canadian and was very proper. She never left the house without coat, hat, skirt, gloves, purse, all matching. When we were born she told mom to have us call her ‘Aunty’ because ‘those children have enough grandmas’. She was a nanny to well-off Seattle doctors and lawyers but never had children of her own, even though she was married four times. It was so sad that, as she told us, all four died of pneumonia. As I got older it dawned on me to wonder about that. I wore the wedding rings from her marriage to Ben, who, she said, was her favorite. And hmmm…lived the longest.
She was small but with these awe-inspiring huge breasts. And her arms had long flaps of skin that she would let me flip back and forth while sitting on her lap.
Cooking for her was a handful of this and a pinch of that. Amazing platters of fried chicken and, oddly, platters of fried smelt as a side dish. She would take little Nilla wafers and painstakingly frost each one, then add sprinkles, for us. Stewed tomatoes and dry toast for breakfast. A glass of carrot juice with Metamucil stirred in. Hard ribbon candy stuck in solid lumps in little crystal bowls. Glass bowls with layers of different colored Jello flavors, with fruit in between. Collections of salt and pepper shakers.
Her windowsills were full of jars of plant cuttings that never got planted. Her clothesline had mason jars of rose cuttings hanging from it. She swore that was how to root roses, that the motion of the wind moving the jars of water made the cuttings root. She always had beautiful roses.
And of course she was feisty. One time young men moved in across the street and started harassing her. They would park in her driveway and block her in. Stand outside her bedroom window at night and smoke, so she could smell it and know they were there. She started sleeping with a bowling pin next to her bed.
And then she recognized one. The son of a doctor she’d babysat. She stomped across the street and lit into him in front of all his friends. Phrases like ‘I wiped your bottom’ and ‘I taught you better’ and ‘you should be ashamed’. Mom was horrified, afraid there would be retaliation. But they never bothered Aunty again.
There was the day when we were in her boat of a car, huge with tail fins that always smelled musty. She sat on a pile of pillows with another pile behind her, to see over the steering wheel. There was a group of teenagers in the middle of the road with their bikes. She stopped and waited. Honked. They laughed and didn’t move. She honked again. Nothing. She gassed it and drove right through the middle of them, right over their abandoned bikes as they scattered.
Each summer she took one of us on a trip. We were special, singled out, and didn’t have to share her with siblings for one whole week. We’d get to ride a bus and go someplace we’d never been. The youngest spent the whole week homesick but still wanted to go. We all wanted that adventure with Aunty.
The upstairs of her house was exciting to sleep in because it was scary. A narrow old staircase that creaked loudly. A big bed three of us shared. A sloping roof with narrow windows at each end. A bookshelf crammed full of moldy smelling Reader’s Digest magazines. And, across from the foot of the bed, right were the roof angled down, were three small doors. If you were brave enough to kneel and crack one open, a blast of cold, stale air would come out. You’d see nothing but pitch black. You were left with only your imagination to show what might live behind those little doors.
I had a very vivid imagination.
and freckles
She told the same stories over and over until we became bored and tuned them out. I wish now I could remember them. The one that sticks with me was about a black horse (in my memories, a stallion). She thought she could ride him and ended up galloping down Main Street out of control. She survived but got in trouble. The story was supposed to be a moral for us to listen to our parents.
I like that image though, of Aunty when she was Ethel Ellen, before she was prim and proper with the sagging breasts and sagging flaps of skin of old age. Before she took in a lonely teenage girl.
Back when she was young and free and riding a wild stallion.
My sister wants to visit the cemetery. While we haven’t been there in years, I knew which one she meant, and was instantly flooded with memories. And the memory of boredom.
Our first dad died when we were young. After that, every Memorial Day, there was a trip to the cemetery. Mom would cut huge bouquets from snowball shrubs and rhododendrons taller than the house eaves. Us kids were required to go along, and the car would be filled with the sickening sweet scents of flowers, sap from cut branches and buds, and crushed leaves. Under it all would be the subtler scents of earth.
Wikimedia Commons Image, by Fulvio Spada
At the cemetery mom used a screwdriver to pull up the vase that invariably would have become overgrown with sod during the previous year. We got to run to the nearby fountain to fill the vase and then mom would arrange the flowers. And then stand there. We were required to also stand there solemnly.
The sister held by our first dad, with paralysis taking over his right side. Aunty next to him. Me, blurry with movement sitting on the back step. Our brother’s little butt. Mom in the doorway in the dark coat.
I used to wonder what she thought about, while us kids fidgeted and waited for the heavy sigh and sniffled tears that said, finally, we could race back to the car and go home. Move on to more important kid things. As I got older I also wondered if there wasn’t a tiny part of her that was aware of the image she presented to all the other annual cemetery visitors – the woman alone with small children standing by a grave. Did people wander over after we left, to see the name of a man who died too young, with his Navy insignia on the headstone? Did they wonder what his story was? If he’d died in the Korean War, perhaps, since the dates were right? Did their imaginations conjure stories for the grieving widow, still so loyal? For the fatherless children? Of course they wouldn’t know that there was a second dad at home, most likely pottering out in the garage enjoying the rare quiet, with pipe in hand.
Second dad. Can you see the pipe stem (unlit at the time) in his left hand?
Later, more graves came along. Aunty, who was more like a grandmother. Her brother, Harry, who lived with her the last year of his life. The one us kids heard coming down the stairs with his signature slow, heavy tread, a week after he died. A great-uncle notorious for never knowing his slacks were unzipped (much to our entertainment) and who got his point across by poking people with his cane.
I find old cemeteries more interesting than new ones. Nine Mile Cemetery in Wallace, Idaho, is up a steep hillside among tamarack trees. I imagine the people there enjoying the view for centuries, since they are almost buried standing upright.
There was one cemetery in Dumfries, Scotland where the headstones were six-foot long slabs with the person’s life story carved there, still readable two hundred years later. The stories they wanted us to remember, beyond just their birth and death dates. The things they were proud of that no one, today, would know.
One of our grandfathers was buried in a small cemetery at the top of a hill in eastern Washington. You can stand there in the trees and hear the wind in their branches.
I have grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great grandparents buried in one called Cherry Creek. It’s also on top of a hill, but in northeastern Montana, where it’s all high mesas and wheat. Wild roses and sunflowers grow around the headstones and you can see for miles. The tiny church there used to double as a one-room schoolhouse that our grandmother taught at.
Photo doesn’t show the steep hillside below the truck.
I spent an overcast day years ago wandering Clare Abbey, near Ennis, Ireland. It’s the ruins of a monastery built in 1194, with the remains of a cemetery inside its walls. The Abbot’s grave is a small mausoleum and the ancient doors had big, rusty door knockers. I never had the courage to knock.
Those old cemeteries have stories.
Clare Abbey, Wikimedia Commons, by Frank Chandler
Newer ones seem lacking in stories. Strategically placed water fountains, surrounded by small flat headstones that can easily be mowed over. I imagine the landscape crew gets impatient on Memorial Day weekends when they have to mow around huge bouquets of snowballs and miniature flags.
As I age, I find myself leaning toward cremation or the concept of green burials, where I can be placed out in the woods to decompose naturally and fertilize the trees. Of course there’s no profit for funeral homes in that type of burial so I doubt it will ever be allowed. It reminds me of a poem I read years ago about the business of dying, about how we have to pay to get our loved ones back.
Cherry Laurel tree
The kayak community here recently built a beautiful bench and hiked it in to a quiet place in the woods with a view of the river where our Sam used to kayak. That, to me, is a perfect, and heart-breaking memorial. That would be a place to visit, to remember. A place that symbolizes the person being remembered and brings that person back to mind, more than a generic square of bronze in a green lawn.
In the meantime, when my sister comes out here, I’ll drive her to the cemetery and we’ll wander together trying to find all the graves of family that we’re probably the only ones left who remember.
Maybe we’ll take flowers.
And I’ll try not to fidget.
Aunty with us (I’m in the middle)
Lisa Stowe - The Story River Blog 