As I shared last week, I’ve been thinking about my current state of ‘old woman-ness’ . That has lead me to a series of memories of the most wonderful, venerable ladies who have graced my life. I can readily think of four women, who I considered ‘old women’ at the time they were in my life, who have had a deep and abiding impact on me. With only one possible exception, these ladies lived quite small lives as far as I know. They were not famous or well known, they weren’t influential on a grand scale. But. Each of them has influenced me and taught me important lessons about life and living and being female. I’d like to publicly thank each one of them and tell you a little of the story of them and me.
I lived far away from my Dad’s mother, and while she was a remarkable woman, she and I never spent much time alone together. My mother’s mother died when I was barely five. I remember her cuckoo clock and that she fed peanuts to squirrels by hand from her kitchen window. So instead of a grandmother, I was gifted with my great Aunt Esther. Aunt Est lived in Mount Vernon, South Dakota, which was about 500 miles from Cheyenne, Wyoming where I grew up. That was a very long way away back then. I do not remember exactly how it happened, but during the summer of 1973, the year between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent a week at Aunt Esther’s house.
For all intents and purposes, it should have been an incredibly boring week for a 17 year old. We didn’t do anything or go anywhere outside the house that I remember. She taught me to do hairpin lace crochet. (We must have gone to the store, because I bought yarn that week and began an afghan that I still have and love, though I don’t remember the trip.) We walked her dog, a dachshund named Fellow who loved cookies. We watched Days of Our Lives, As the World Turns, and the Watergate trials. The soap operas were commonplace to me, my mom watched them. They were just what being home in the early afternoon meant. The Watergate Trials were a different story. I didn’t understand them, and Esther, with patience and simplicity, explained them to me, step by step. So began an interest and understanding of politics and the political world that I would never had if it hadn’t been for Esther. We also talked. I don’t remember specific conversations, but I do remember leaving her home armed and enabled in a way that I’d never felt before.
The me before that week was different than the me after that week, and while she didn’t overtly encourage me do do so, I registered to vote on my 18th birthday and joined the Navy right out of high school – actions at least indirectly related to the empowerment I got from Aunt Est. In the places that my mother, in love and fear for her last born child and her own innate timidity, couldn’t grant me encouragement, Esther could. It was fitting, then, that after I left home, Aunt Esther and I continued our friendship by mail. I have each letter still, tied with ribbon and kept safe. I have transcribed each one, so I can read them digitally whenever I want or need to. Her letters: received at boot camp, when I was struggling at the Defense Language Institute, in Rota, Spain where I was later stationed, as a lonely girl away from home, as a newlywed, as a mom-to-be. Her letters shared with me the wisdom of a life lived with faith, love, integrity and commitment. She told me stories of growing up on a very poor farm, a girl when girls weren’t prized. She shared how, without an education, she immersed herself in books and news to teach herself what she needed to know to become a better person. She shared sadness and defeat and gave me glimpses of how one could triumph over events that seem overwhelming. (How could you live on when your husband accidentally shoots and kills your toddler as he cleaned his gun?) Above all, she loved me. Unconditionally. She didn’t always agree with me, and she encouraged me to slow down and take time to think things through. But, when I didn’t, she didn’t send recriminations or disappointment, she was just there to love me.
Aunt Esther died while I was in Spain. My mother’s letter, telling me the news is tied with a ribbon with the rest. I’ve never been back to Mount Vernon, and I’ve never put a rose at her headstone. But I don’t need a rock or a plot of land as a memorial to my Aunt Esther. I hope, more than anything, that I have internalized her love of reading and her love of thinking as well as her love for living life in such a way that I myself am a monument to her.
