The family was surprised, yes, but also elated. We knew her as an irascible one, prone to sudden fits of anger over the tiniest things: a child who didn’t know what the breast stroke was, or a canoe paddle left wrong end up on the shore. Any complaints about worms in apples would elicit purple-in-the-face anger and stories of her having been sent to her room hungry many nights, long ago, for similar offenses. She wasn’t easy to love, but love her I did.
Aunt Jane was finally getting married! Her new hubby was way cool, a college professor. He came with three kids in ages that spanned the ages of our five. He was handy! He was fun! And when she was with him, she was not nearly as volatile. The two of them fixed up an abandoned cottage on our lake property so that they could live in it. They filled the root cellar in the big house with all kinds of wines, dandelion and elderberry and grape. For seven years, all was well at the lake.
Until. You know. It had to end. No one could live with Aunt Jane for long. She was difficult. And once alone again, she became very, very depressed.
I went to live with her for that first summer. She credited me with saving her life. I don’t know how I managed to stay in that tiny cottage with her, other than that the lake was there, and the sailboat, and the canoe, and I could go out to be free on the water all by myself whenever my chores were done or her ire too much. My skin browned to a beautiful Greek deep gold. I was fit, I felt accomplished and boy did I ever learn a lot about growing and preserving my own food.
We grew nearly everything we ate behind the cottage. We would lay black plastic down long rows, cut holes in them three feet apart, fill the holes with water, then cram tomato seedlings in. No staking needed. We had plenty of room to just let those tomato plants sprawl as their fruits ripened on the plastic. We tied the leaves of cauliflower up over the heads so they would not turn green. Many of the foods we grew were ones I had never eaten before: okra, fried green tomatoes, spaghetti squash, eggplant, jalapenos, elderberries and, yes, wormy apples. I learned how to place broccoli into salted water so the worms would float out, and then I ate the broccoli. I dared not NOT eat it. We’re talking Aunt Jane here…
We froze and canned food for hours on end. Jellies, and sauces, and salsas, and pickles. We froze peas, and beans, and squashes of all kinds. The cottage would become steamy hot, but no matter. A dip in the nearby lake would cool us right off for the rest of the day. A lakeside campfire and some song at night to end the day brought on some of the sweetest sleep I can remember in my life. I woke refreshed, and eager to get to those chores, so that I could get out on the lake and ride the wind.
I remember that first, and still only, year of depending on what I could grow myself for food as a great summer. I don’t remember many of the skills I learned, and it would be another forty or more years before I tried my hand at growing my own food again.
I’m a bit older now. I’m old, actually. My bones creak, my back complains now and then, and I have to be very careful of my knees. Arthritis owns my thumbs. But the garden? I love me an afternoon of working in my garden. I owe that love, in large part, to my Aunt Jane.
I wish she were still alive so that I could tell her that.
This is my entry to the Garden Hive community's very first mid-month creative writing challenge. Come write with us! @tezmel and @carolkean this is right up your alleys. But just so you know, you only have one more day on this challenge. Get cracking! Poetry would fly too.
Here is a previous post I wrote about my Aunt Jane.
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I L.OV.E. your memory. And I think I love your Aunt Jane too. What a lady. It's sad that some people are just so impossible to love. I think they have so much more hurt than we can imagine and instead of dealing with it and healing form it they deny it and lash out. What a heritage she left you. I'm sure if push came to shovel you would do far better surviving out of a garden than you think. Love your story telling @owasco. This one is a winner @riverflows!
This one was easy to write.
Aunt Jane lived to 90. She lived alone, on the lake, tending her garden and swimming every day, until she entered hospice. As @tezmel said above, she leaned into being herself like no one else I have ever known. I come from some strong stuff! Thanks for your appreciation of her. I think this is the adulation she always desired, and deserved really, a posthumus fame of sorts.
What a rare story of love!
Aunt Jane sounds like she was battling herself and was forced either to toil the land in exchange for a bit of inner peace or let her mouth chase it downhill. I am sure her inability to express the darkest parts of herself is among the reasons she held on to her temper as it validated whatever she felt.
I might be wrong though.
Isn't gardening something amazing though? It helped keep the both of you together as you fell in love with what probably anchored her spirit to this realm. I may have had a problem with living so close to a lake, eating okras, or her thunderous anger but I would have certainly enjoyed watching her when her reflexes relaxed and the art of nurturing both the soil and the produce took over her.
Thank you for the tag 🔆
You can't help but speak with beauty, can you?
She taught all of us a lot: a lot of songs, a lot about nature, a lot about water sports, and a lot about love. Many of us did not learn her lessons well though. She became a laughing stock eventually. Several in the family were horrible to her, even though she was the most loyal person in our lives. Lots of battles between my parents and her. My mother and she grew up on the lake property, both motherless and/or abandoned.
You spoil me with compliments.
It is interesting how the ones who lean into being themselves are the ones society judges harshly the most. I am glad she left you a bit of her wealth.
She left us all of her "wealth." It wasn't much, but she was frugal, and she had land on a lake. I am so grateful she was my aunt.
I love your Aunt Jane and the way you celebrate all that was good in her, even while acknowledging she was difficult, hot-tempered, prone to bouts of depression, reviled by others - but not you! - for you, the goodness in her was unmissable, though everyone else seemed to miss it. Not see it. Not love this woman unconditionally.
You really show us how we can spend time with a dreaded family member, the "toxic" aunt in today's lingo, and how you learned so much from her and internalized so many good memories of that home on the lake. And that aunt who opened her doors to so many nieces and nephews and siblings. How sad that became a "laughing stock" - she, "the most loyal" person in your lives.
Now I'll be calling upon the soul of Aunt Jane when I set off on my lonely meadow walks.
Walk with me - join me - I invite whatever kind spirits may be capable of hearing me.
Bruni (@wonderwop) was a cradle Catholic, so I have fewer qualms about inviting him into my daily meditations (i.e., the Rosary. I know. I know. Don't laugh. One mantra is as good as another, right?)
Your aunt and your mother grew up "motherless and/or abandoned" - well, here's another one to unpack! If you've already blogged about it, please send links. :)
Love these stories of Lake Owasco and your vivid portraits of family. Thank you. You're brightened many a dark day with these images from your rich and colorful childhood.
My mother's mother died when she was 18 months old, and her father sent her and her older brother to live at the lake with their maternal grandmother, who grossly favored the brother (he has corroborated this). Jane had already been abandoned by both her parents and left to live there, so they both were essentially raised (my mother until she was 12, when shewent to live with her father and step mother) by a grandmother who was quite unkind. My mother was very loving, with her flaws of course, so I like to think that her birth mother gave her some loving for those first 18 months.
Uncle Bruni!
This is beautiful prose and wonderful way of describing a past memory tinged with nostalgia. Excellent!
Thank you!!!
This is really pretty to know. Even though your Autie is no more but this story is really touching. Thanks for the good write up!
And thank YOU for the sweet comment. Also for tagging me!
Sometimes the people who are hard to love make the biggest impressions. On my post someone said my Nana seemed warm, but she wasn't at all. Still, she made a huge impression on me and I loved her.
The thought of the root cellar filled with hedgerow wines and the lake seems so romantic. What a shame they didn't work out. Poor Jane - she clearly made her own bed but everyone needs love.
What a wonderfully written memory. Like @alt3r, you put the reader right inside it - we can smell the soil, the grit of dirt under our fingernails.
I'd like to think I could be someone's influential relative, but so far I have a son who hates gardening and my seven month old grandson is too young to brainwash quite yet.
Honestly, I didn't garden for veggies for decades afterwards. Flowers, yes. Lots of perennial flowers, but veggies? None. I used to gift Aunt Jane shrubs and perennials, or prints of flowers. She heeded the happiness. And boy did she ever love getting presents. So the point here is that there is still hope for your son. And grandson.
The place, now that I have a larger share in its ownership, is not so romantic anymore. It's been neglected so long I think I will go broke just trying to keep the house standing and the buckthorn at bay. She did a lot of the manual labor while she lived there, until she died at the age of 90. Now I have to do it!
Oh! I just remembered! One of the last things she said to me was "I just want you to love the place." I guess I am carrying out her last wish.
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You've written of this time before and I always find your memories magical, of that time. It may not have felt it so much at the time, but that was truly a wonderful summer you had.
It was just... life. I'm still trying to hang onto it, but it's getting very costly to live this way. Ironic, to do all yourself on a nice piece of property will take all the money you have.
This is all too true:
To have land, to own a house, a home - this is something many of take for granted.
And to have a LAKE - a home on a lake!
To swim every day as your aunt did, up until age 90 - did she really? In New York state? Did she have an indoor pool too?
What a woman!
If we live on in spirit, I'm calling on Aunt Jane.
All you beautiful souls who've gone before us: come live in me, dwell in me, or hey, just hang out with me a few minutes each day. Can you smell the lilacs and see dew drops glistening in the morning sun, if you pop in for a visit with me?
Do I sound like I'm coming unhinged?
My dad's demise has been long and oh, so drawn out, but this week, he seems to be on his way out of this life, perhaps sooner rather than later; and even though he was about as lovable as your spinster aunt, even if he was sometimes not a kind or gentle father, he was MY dad, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth and my heart will ache for this man.
I hope your aunt stayed mostly intact until the end. You mention hospice. (Cancer?)
Dad has leg ulcers (who knew such a thing existed) that leak...
Oh the indignity of old age!
Your Minotaur story (prompt: the rowboat was leaking) - the woman on the boat feeling her age - oh man.
We are not living longer, these days. We are taking longer to die. --Andy Luck
She went to the Y when the lake was too cold. She was always the first one into the lake in the spring, and the last one out in the fall. Pretty amazing really.
Goodness no! You sound like the healthiest among us, able to bring the "dead" (whatever that is) back to life (whatever that is).
Oh no! You do not need another loss so soon! But there will be relief. I hope you let yourself feel that. It really helped me to know that I would not have to be a part anymore of Niko's suffering, that his suffering had ended. Of course, I miss the happiness he had, and he might have had, had he regained his health. That is the toughest thing - missing stuff that never even happened.
Jane ran a stop sign at the corner of Dunning and Koon, an intersection she had driven through countless times before with a proper stop. During the ER visit they found pancreatic cancer. She didn't live long after that, a couple months. I often wonder how much the knowledge of the cancer hadn't really hastened her death. She took very few meds until that accident. The drugs are killing us, not the illnesses.
It sounds as if you were as much to her as she was to you. Everyone should have an Aunt Jane.
#everyone, I urge you to read the previous post.
For those who won't click on the link, here are a few excerpts:
"Aunt Jane. 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." .... "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 stepmother could only love a child she had born herself."
Somehow, she became a loving being despite a lack of love all around her. Jane and she eventually became equal part owners of the lake property, with one third in the hands of a third cousin. My sister and I are now in the very same boat, same proportions of ownership, one third elsewhere. Thankfully, she and I don't fight nearly as much as my mother and Jane did. A bit here and there, largely because text and email communication is so easily misread.