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Nov
27
What We Keep
Filed Under Ruminations
For the past several weeks, we’ve been liquidating the estate of my great aunt. Aunt Rene (short for Irene) was a great aunt, indeed, and not just in the sense of lineage. She was a fun-loving, flirty, funny girl up until the day she died at the age of 97.5 years. She and her husband experienced hard times - they even lived in what was called “the poor farm”. But Irene didn’t sit and whine about it - in fact, I never heard her whine about anything. She didn’t lament how unfair life was to her, she didn’t complain about how little she had, she didn’t stay in bed under the covers crying because she’d wanted a different life for herself.
No, she didn’t.
When the times got hard - and they were most of her life - she got going. An enterprising woman, she moved from the poor farm into a house in town to take care of a sick, elderly man. The agreement with his adult son who lived in Florida and had no desire to move back to this small, hick town was to pay Aunt Rene by giving her the house and its contents upon his death. When Irene’s husband died way too early, she had a smaller rental house built on the back of the lot, and when that wasn’t enough to pay her meager bills, she built a room on part of the front porch and closed off that side of the house and rented it out, too.
Aunt Rene was quite the flirt, asking my daughter’s dates if they had a younger brother and trying to convince my husband Andy to leave me for her. (I’ll declare I think he considered it sometimes!) When it seemed too much for her to continue to take care of her sister Lucy, we took her to lunch at a nearby assisted living facility so she could have a look around. Playing on her flirtiness, I arranged the lunch ahead of time and asked if they would invite any single men in residence to eat with us. We walked into the private dining room, and nobody was more surprised than Aunt Rene to see Mr. Luther, her former beau. Aunt Rene and Mr. Luther dated for years until Mr. Luther broke it off, complaining that Aunt Rene spent more time with her sister than she did with him.
Aunt Rene remained mentally sharp and quick right up until the day she died - she just seemed to get a bit confused when it came to sleeping and waking. Every time she woke up - whether from her morning nap, her afternoon nap, or in the morning after a good night’s sleep - she’d think it morning again and take her pills. Some days could see her having 4 rounds of tablets, as she called them.
Aunt Rene’s age was a tightly kept secret, and I’m thinking that’s the best thing Irene taught me: just because you can count it doesn’t mean it counts. Age is a number on a piece of paper, sure, but much more importantly, it’s an attitude. Irene taught me by example that if you don’t know how old you are, you won’t act your age. And if you don’t tell others how old you are, they’ll treat you just as you (to use a medical term) present.
As we prepared to sell her things, I wandered through looking for something to keep, a souvenir of Irene’s life, something to remember her by. And though I could tell you where every piece of furniture was positioned in her house, nothing held enough sentimental appeal for me to claim it. At first that bothered me, and in true Jeanne fashion, I questioned myself in search of shortcomings that might be the cause. But as I write this and watch it go off in an entirely different direction than I’d originally planned, I see that what I’ll keep as treasures are the memories of Irene. Her legacy is her humor, her ageitude, her self-reliance, her refreshing personal definition of abundance - not spoken, but shared by example. I remember those late night canasta card games played at her kitchen table; the meticulous unwrapping of gifts so the paper and ribbon could be preserved and used again; the surprising upper body strength that became evident only when she parted my childhood hair. I remember how my children loved to spend the day with Aunt Rene - how, regardless of the calendar, she’d hide cheese balls in low azalea branches for them to find; how they laughed when she cranked-up her car and revved, revved, revved the motor before putting it in gear; how she always cooked their favorite foods: peas and bacon. I have cuttings of her oak leaf hydrangeas and have transplanted peonies and lilies and ferns from her yard to mine. Plants and memories that will bloom year after year - that’s what I’ll keep. Things that, with a little bit of caring, live on for generations to come. At the risk of sounding cliche or like a credit card commercial, though the furniture may hold some monetary value, the memories, well, they’re priceless.
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