My Aunt Lucy

 My Aunt Lucy

    Aunt Lucy was a large woman who wore dark print winter dresses and thick spectacles. In the summers, she  wore cotton print dresses with aprons that did not necessarily match.  She taught nine and ten year olds, and in the summer, when her sisters came to visit her, they slept late, then sat over brunch in their bathrobes talking about school until two or three in the afternoon, when it would be time to think about supper.

    At nineteen, in November 1924, she wore a shapeless black coat on the train to a remote school district near Parry Sound where she’d been belatedly hired to teach.  She was met during a blizzard by a burly fur-coated man who looked like a buffalo driving a horse and sleigh. Twenty years her senior, he was the school board chairman. Though she  was afraid of him at first, two years later they were married.  He earned a living as a resort owner and hunting guide for tourists.  She cooked for his hunting parties on a wood stove, and knew many ways to prepare venison. Later she taught in a one-room school. After her husband died, she brought her teenaged daughter to her old home town and found a better  teaching position. What heaven! Only thirty children and two grades in a school with indoor plumbing.

    Years later, when she was a widow, if a crowd of relatives dropped by unexpectedly, she could whip up a meal quicker than in the parable about the loaves and fishes. When I went to teachers’ college I visited her every other weekend and talked to her about everything.  She was popular in the family, the one everyone went to in times of crisis for a listening ear and a home-cooked meal.  When she had other visitors, she and I slept on cots at opposite ends of her sun-porch. The moon glowed above the mill, the train whistled and rocked on the trestle, rain pattered on the roof and brought out the scent of mint, pulp and paper and sun-dried sheets.

    Aunt Lucy had insomnia, like me. As a child in the early years of the 20th century, she used to get up and sit on the turn of the stairs, not daring to join her parents in the front room.  When I visited her during my year of teachers’ college, I often got up in the morning and found her dozing on the living room sofa. 

    When I visited we’d talk about life’s surprises, ironies and uncertainties, but for Lucy, some things were sure: She knew that someday she would meet her husband again, and others who had gone before. This conviction was as vivid in her mind as the stained glass windows in her church. When she was old and ill, she told me that death could be a friend.

    At her wake, one of my little nieces whispered to me that Aunt Lucy didn’t look like herself. The other girl murmured that she couldn’t very well be buried in  her cotton print dress and apron.  Meanwhile, Lucy slept serenely in her casket, dressed in her best.

    If she’d been in charge of the funeral buffet, the food would have been better.