Nearly eighty years old, and still teaching the younguns to swim
She wasn’t an easy person to love. Inflammatory doesn’t quite capture the apoplectic states of being she would enter whenever something, or someone, displeased her. Volatile, controlling, alcoholic. The kind of grown-up kids stayed clear of, to avoid her suddenly focusing her extreme ire on them. Her voice, when raised, was LOUD. Her arms, when she was agitated, would flail. She was large for a woman, and strong too. as a result of her long life spent, except for a few years as an urbanite after college, living on a farm.
I can’t remember much about any of my grandparents, largely because my mother was estranged from both her mother-in-law, and her step mother. Mom did not score big in the mother department – her birth mother died when she was still a baby, the grandmother who then cared for her resented her, and her eventual step mother could only love a child she had born herself. Still, we five kids had lots of family around us in the way of aunts and uncles. I have chosen to write about one of those.
As a graduate of high school
Aunt Jane. Both of Jane’s parents abandoned her when she was very young. Whether Aunt Jane became so angry as a result of her abandonment, or was abandoned because she was so easily angered, is no longer known by anyone living. I remember who she was as an adult. She was not easy to love, but somehow I did just that.
As a first cousin of my mother’s, she wasn’t even technically my aunt. My mother and she were raised, having both been left motherless as babes, with their unkind mutual grandmother, and were very much like sisters. Not the close kind of sisters, but the kind of sisters who tolerate each other with very little love involved. They remained in close proximity until the ends of their lives, despite their mixed feelings.
With my mother, the short one!
The home my mother and Jane shared as children is a fabulous 100 acre farm on a large lake in central New York State. When I was a child, we spent a lot of time there. My Aunt Jane lived in one or another of the several homes on the land, until her recent death at the age of 90.
Aunt Jane, despite her anger issues, was very generous with her knowledge and her time. Her life on the farm had been spent learning the ways of nature, including the ways of the lake.
Aunt Jane taught me how to swim, handle many kinds of watercraft, water-ski, build a bonfire, drive a stick shift, recognize many poisonous plants, forage edible wild plants, grow fruits and vegetables, and preserve vegetables and fruits by various methods. We all spent countless nights singing and making s'mores around campfires. She would eat any s'more a child made for her, until she couldn’t get another bite in. At these events, she shone.
Then came a summer when we were both deeply depressed and feeling crappy about ourselves. I was 19, and I chose to spend several months living with her after her recent divorce, slaving away in her garden and kitchen every day, braving her volatility, learning a tremendous amount, and still having plenty of time out on the lake. She and I lived in a tiny lakeside cottage, with a large veggie garden out back. It was with Aunt Jane that I first tasted okra and spaghetti squash. She handed me a small paperback guide with instructions on how to sail, and encouraged me while I learned. Aunt Jane grew and preserved nearly all the fruits and veggies she ate. Her house was very clean, her days orderly, and on most summer days she made sure to take a robust swim in the lake. To live like this with her was healing for me. But the greatest gift my Aunt Jane taught me was how to be still and silent when someone I loved was suffering to the point of losing control. Eventually she would recognize her error, and be very loving. We remained close for the rest of her life, she even going so far as to say that I had saved her life that summer.
The others in my family wondered how I could stand her. In alliance with my mother and father, the rest of the family turned on her. They would be kind to her face, and absolutely horrible to her when she wasn’t around. After her death, it became a big joke in my family to put framed photos of her in compromising places around the house. The bathrooms were common hanging spots, the seat of the tractor, the root cellar, now moldy but still full of her dandelion wine. Many a drunken night has been spent ridiculing her around the campfire, the same fire she taught all of us to sing folk songs around, on the shore of the lake she taught all of us to swim in.
This woman was generous and, most importantly, loyal, until the day of her death, leaving everything she owned to the five of us. Her final wish for us all was that we love that lake property as she had.
The first thing the other four did after her death was to explore selling it off. I stand in the way.
When I think of who remains in my family today, I see rifts, misunderstandings, alliances with, or against, this one or that. Dredging up remembered hostilities in my family of origin, I can recognize how this divisive behavior has been handed down from the generations before mine, and how we are now teaching our own children to be divided, suspicious, unkind, and generally self-serving. A great deal of alcohol is consumed, and I can’t help but think this is a root cause of our irrational behavior toward one another.
Aunt Jane still bears the brunt of this division, even several years after her death.
Here I am at the end of my post. It has become something very different from what I had set out to talk about. I wanted to laud a very complicated person, who was nonetheless generous, loyal and deserving of love. I ended up also exploring the ridicule my family has rained on that person.
May I find the strength to mend, at least a tiny bit, the rifts that exist in my family-of-origin, so that we pass fewer of these rifts onto the coming generations.
This is my entry to 