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.
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.
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 @galenkp's Grandparent Stories Contest. How nice to bring back to life someone who might otherwise have spent the rest of eternity in obscurity.
Wow!! This post explains so much that I only vaguely knew of, e.g., the lake house, and how you are the only one of five nieces and nephews who stand in the way of selling it. How I feel for your aunt! "Some people are easier to love at a distance," but you braved her surly temper to spend a summer with her and learn from her. What a woman! How strong, how competent and wise in the arts of gardening, canning, cooking, preserving - you paint such a vivid picture of her, and it hurts to know that others could not look beyond her "anger management issues" (if that's the right term) and love her for the good things:
Abandoned by parents. Your motherless mom, and virtually orphaned Jane, raised by grandparents who resent the burden. This post is filled with many novels worth of stories, if you ever decide to write them. I'm thinking of the Jalna saga by Mazo de la Roche. You may not have that many generations of characters you'd know well enough to write about. No, I never read the entire series - just one book! - but the family and their estate remain in my mind decades later, which is something.
The series finale (rebirths! healing! the clan returning to its roots!) is what makes me think the families of Lake Owasco would be literary classics:
Jalna: Books 13-16: Return to Jalna / Renny's Daughter / Variable Winds at Jalna / Centenary at Jalna (Jalna Box-Set Book 4)
That is a LOT of books to read, to get to that finale.
I don't even know (remember) your maiden name, or the clan name, but your Aunt Jane is worthy of at least one novel. Your devotion to her, your loyalty, your unconditional love is the kind of theme I want to read about when I pick up a novel. Sadly, most books don't deliver this. The one I'm reading now may be a DNF (did not finish) because the family is so unlikable. I could be reading about the Whiteoak family instead!
THANK YOU for sharing your Aunt Jane with us and your lesson (not the least bit didactic!) on how much we can learn and benefit from even our most-difficult family members. As you concluded:
WRITE MORE ABOUT HER please - if you don't feel up to tackling a novel, I'd love to help! or an anthology of short stories - #AuntJane (and my own spinster aunt Malita) have earned a place in literature. :)
Those books sound like just the thing for me now! I've had enough of Gulag Archipelago, talk about insanity. Let me delve into insanity and cruelty on a family level. That's just what I need lol.
Thank you for liking my story. I was worried I had written too simply, and not hit the happiness factor that may have been the intent of the contest.
I always marveled at Aunt Jane's persistence in consorting with us. She just kept coming by at dinner time, even during the years when my father would not speak a single word to her. I suppose there is much more to say. The 65 birthday when we were all at the lake on the actual day. I wanted to throw her a party, and was denied. The most they would let me do for her was hand her a card that we had all signed. She must have been devastated. I know I was. Cruel, they were all so mean to her. At least I got her cat. When she got the cat from ASPCA, she had to have someone who would promise to take the cat if she died. She called me. Oh now I am missing her so much!!!
They were so cruel. Yes. Her birthday party: DENIED. Just a card. After all she had taught them. After all the smores she'd let them feed her 'round the campfire. Unfathomable. You got her cat - I hope there's truth to this persistent belief that cats house spirits, and her cat remembers "Servant Jane" with as much fondness as you do. I used to think about how many years Freddy Mercury's cats remained alive after he had passed, and what it would be like to have his cats in my home. AUNT JANE'S CAT would be a great character in one of these trendy new "cozy mysteries" which almost always seem to have a paranormally sentient cat in the cast.
Let me know if you ever read the Whiteoak saga. I should take up the whole thing myself. The style is very last-century, meaning fiction worskhoppers would attack the novels with red ink and line edits. Meh! These classics endure; they're still read decades after the author died.
I love your aunt Jane and wish my own spinster aunt had engaged with us like Jane did. Even so, I feel the same way about Malita as you do about your Aunt Jane: Oh now I am missing her so much!!!
There's something about wanting to be a source of love for these unloved creatures.
Her cat is in my lap right now, and I feel close to her. Her cat loved her, and she loved her cat.
Wanna read the books together? I love the older books.
Let me know if you find copies - I'll check bookfinder.com - that is a lot of books!!
I'd love to read them with you, of course.
At the lake, on a porch swing... with cats in laps...
Aunt Jane's cat is alive and in your lap! LIFE IS GOOD!!!!
I haven't run into what I would imagine a normal family would be.. We all make the best of what we have, if we are lucky.
A "normal" family. You mean, like The Brady Bunch or the Waltons, where rifts are quickly mended and love prevails? Yeah. Not the norm, to be sure. My dad would groan and wince and make fun of these "sappy" TV families and their "revolting" displays of affection and sentiment.
That will all change when humans will be interfaced with AI. That is the ones that are left after the world wide genocide. Have a nice day.. 😊
Eep!!
Where did all your optimism go....the eleven cats are getting to you! Filling you with cat-like wariness, distrust, and all the Survival of the FIttest defensive tactics. Scary Mary, save us!
Jab, jab, jab Bye, bye bye
From the outside, I'm sure my family looks to be a Walton type family. This is a story from the inside. I am also the only person in my extended family (besides my own offspring) who has not submitted to the medical experiment, so I might someday be the only person left alive.
So only you and your children. That is it? What kills me, no pun intended thou I am full of puns, is the blatant lies being told. Latest that all the covy patients in the hospital are unvacxx when it is the opposite. Good excuse for isolating the healthy unvacxx. Making them lepers while the real lepers walk about freely.
Thank you so much! @blacklux, how have you been?
All good in my corner of the world. Hope all is good with you too.
Nicely written, thanks for sharing.
Whatever you intended to do doesn't matter, that was such a nice read. I'm glad you joined the contest.
Your aunt knew the other four would sell that property. But she knew it would stay in the family because of you. You're doing great.
Thank you for reading so closely. It was not at all what I set out to write. But then, writing is how I find out my inner feelings.
How very sad, the severe rift. We have a similar one in my family, not as severe, but just as damaging. Alcohol can be so damaging....
Sorry you are so familiar with this dynamic, @goldenoakfarm. I've begun to wonder how many of us have no idea what it's like to be called to love drunken, dysfunctional, destructive, or toxic family members. Don't we ALL have at least one family member like this? @0wasco, I applaud your determination to break the cycle and mend the old rifts.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Alcohol is a devil. I struggle with it myself, which has set me even further apart from the others. Covid sure has not helped!!!
I didn't comment on this angle because it's so painful, so awful, my literary solution would be to have them all get struck by lightning at the lake's edge, but I did the count-to-ten thing (ten MINUTES) and have found only that my outrage has increased, not abated. BRING ON THE LIGHTNING BOLT:
My entire family, including me and Jane, were/are alcoholics. Now the next generation is underway. None of mine drink to excess thankfully, and two of them don't drink at all. At least I can have an effect on that madness.
You too....? I never knew! (No such thing as a "former" alcoholic, I've heard.) I'm sorry you struggle with that and hope it's easier as the years go by. As a chef, how do handle cooking sherry and wine in recipes.... I miss my mom's Black Forest cake with rum (kirsch?) in the cherry juice. For me, no ingredient is safe: wheat flour, butter, milk, eggs, even chocolate. Food! Glorious Food!
The foods of our childhood -
Every holiday, even certain weekdays, were defined by food. Saturday morning pancakes. Etc.....
It's not easy to be the first one to stop the cycle, to reverse the trend, to effect positive changes. May all you scattered family rally around and follow your lead. (those cousins! who also knew Aunt Jane!) -
Covid has been really hard for me. No meetings. So now I buy exactly two airplane bottles a day. No more. No other alcohol in the house, unless it's something I would never drink, like kirsch! Which is really good in cakes, but not good for much else.
How about seltzer water, aromatic bitters (half a spoonful?), and a twist of lime on ice?
With perhaps a dash of Uncle Val's botannical gin?
Miles showed me that one. #Love it. Esp if at a bar if you want to appear to be drinking the real deal.
I never drank kirsch or rum out of a bottle, but scotch, neat, is --
--ok, I shut up now.
Beer is my favorite but none of it is truly gluten free *sob! - Beer saved civilization!
What is Oktoberfest without BIER?
Wine is fine, red and dry,
and I'm agonna make you cry
if I don't stop this.
Nobody freewrites quite as well as you!! I love it when you start writing poetry.
You crack me up!
I *start writing poetry
only
if you'll take over and finish
for me.
Shared - Facebook and Twitter - does anyone still do #POS, proof of share?
Incredible post, and hard to read as well, those rift, my family got one too, but i decided not to write about it, i did my very best to stay clear of it, is was painfull and anoying to do so.
I see you as a brave one, capable of reaching out to your aunt in both pain, and happyness, you are a role model to be follow, thank you for opening this memoirs to us <3
They look so happy
She sounds like a very complicated person
But out of this story, I am glad there was one person who loved her
I saw the good reading your story (even though you started it off with all her negative) and after reading your shared summer and your thoughts about her - I couldn't understand why she became the joke or was/is hated on...