Auntie Anne

A lady of grace and dignity, Auntie was also a bit of a hellraiser in department stores if she did not get her way. She had been a nurse in the first world war and a school teacher for forty years so you didn't mess with Auntie even if she stood only five feet tall. When my mom was 14, Auntie took her in, giving her private voice lessons and enrolled her in a girl's boarding school where my mom flourished. She sent my mom to college but in her second year, my mom met my dad and decided to leave school. Auntie was none too pleased with what my mom did and disowned her. Every possession that Auntie had collected in her travels abroad went to the catholic church. She sold all my mom's costumes that she'd worn on stage - beautiful gowns from operas that my mom performed in were auctioned off to the lowest bidder because Auntie was furious with my mom for marrying a non-catholic and livid for getting pregnant out of wedlock.

But after my dad died, Auntie came around. The first year after we lost my dad, Auntie sent a truck load of toys to us. Not what we needed! We had just moved from Miami to New England and it was cold that year! We needed ski jackets and leggings and boots and warm socks, but we did have a fun Christmas that year. My mom explained that we needed necessities, not frivolities. And so Auntie obliged. She would catch us enjoying something and before long, we would see cases of it at our door. For instance, once we visited her little apartment in Boston and one of my sisters loved the canned rice pudding she served us. None of the rest of us liked it, only that one sister who to this day still has undeveloped taste buds... Later that week a truck pulled up to our house and delivered 20 cases of canned rice pudding. Plain, vanilla rice pudding, 24 cans per case. Those cans went out across our town for every food drive that year and the next. There was only so much rice pudding one girl could eat. None of the rest of us could stomach the pale yellow stuff. We stacked the cans in the cellar (it had a dirt floor so it wasn't a basement). We had a flood that next spring and I remember going down the cellar stairs and there were cans of rice pudding floating all over the cellar with labels unglued and fading and slowly sinking in the water. I took cans with no labels after the flood to school dances, to football games, every event that required canned goods was graced with a slightly rusted, silver can of rice pudding.

Once Auntie was visiting us and we ran out of toilet paper and she commented how we must go through a lot of it with such a large family. Sure enough! A truck stopped at our house with a huge delivery of toilet paper. We had to store it in the attic and in all of our closets because there was a pallet of toilet paper that had to go somewhere and the cellar was off limits. Every time I see a pallet of toilet paper at WalMart stacked up on the upper shelves, I'm reminded of Auntie and her ability to amuse us in her desire to help us. Had to give her credit, though, she was trying to provide us with some necessities rather than frivolities.

But that bolt of green denim had to be the most amusing. We had come in from playing outside and Auntie mused aloud how many pairs of dungarees we must go through in a year. A few days after her visit, here comes a truck with an entire bolt of green denim! My mom stored that bolt of fabric in numerous places around the house. She was unwilling to throw it away, but couldn't decide what to make with it. We would not surrender to green jeans even if the fashions of the wild sixties went to bizarre colors! We would not be Captain Kangaroo's sidekick. That bolt of fabric from Auntie became a tent our mother made, which became a memory we hold close to our hearts; a fleeting remembrance of friends and laughter and a girl who became a woman who still asks us today nearly forty years later, "how many mothers make tents?"

I have Auntie to thank for some of the threads of my childhood. Auntie is to thank for the woman who became my mom. Living with a mother who was mentally unstable, my mom was able to escape the turbulence and desperation that was her home life into a world where Auntie protected and nurtured her. Through her twenties, Auntie did not speak to her. Through her thirties and beyond, Auntie was there with her amusing quirks and hilarious deliveries of necessities. She was a little dynamo of a woman who saw the world change from horse-drawn carriages on the streets of Boston to airplanes that could carry one across country in less than a day. She lived from the start of the twentieth century until the end. I wish I had known her better.

The big green tent

And there we were desolute for something to do on summer vacation. Long days of weeding the garden were not satisfying a teenager's soul for excitement. My sister and I planned the whole thing and took it to our mother for approval. We wanted to invite two girlfriends each for a backyard camp out. We had a tent the family used each summer. It was large enough for six to sleep comfortably. My parents always slept in a pup tent. When we reached our teens, the boys also got a separate tent. Anyway, we took the plan to our mother and she approved. We were ecstatic and called all our friends.

She pulled out the tent from the summer before and it had been chewed up by moths. So what to do now everyone has been invited. She had a bolt of green denim her aunt had sent to make us dungarees (that is what we called blue jeans back then! lol) but we wouldn't be caught dead in green jeans. My aunt's pecadillos will make up another blog post! So she finds the bolt of green denim and designs a tent - with screened windows and a zippered door. My mom sewed all our clothes so a tent was nothing, just straight lines. While she was busily making the tent, my sister and I took care of all the household chores. My sister's girlfriend Sandy (who seemed to live at our house) helped my mother by holding the growing tent. Mom's sewing machine was a big professional Bernina so it could handle the heavy fabric. Sandy would 'walk' the material from the front porch where my mom had the machine into the living room and back. The tent became a big green monster! When it was finished we needed ropes wrapped around tree branches at each end of the roof to hold it up. We staked the corners at the floor. It was a massive tent that all of us could stand up in and not have to bend over.

Before long, my brothers were involved and we pulled out the other tent and it was in great shape. So my brothers invited their friends. We had four boys and six girls in the back yard all under 14 not including my younger siblings. We cooked outside. My mom charged everyone a dollar a day for food but we went through that by breakfast. We played in the pool and chased each other. I still had to weed the garden every day but it wasn't so bad with all my friends helping. One of my girlfriends had a transistor radio (pre-iPod days lol) so we got to sing along to great songs while we worked. And we figured if we got up early and got the weeding done by 9am, we'd miss the heat of the day. Maybe that's when I became an early bird. I"m up at the crack of dawn every day.

I wrote a story about that week and submitted it to a couple of magazines. It never went anywhere, but Sandy told us years later that our home saved her. She laughs when we get together to reminisce and she'll ask every time, "How many mothers make tents?" I'm not sure, but mine did. And it was a BIG green tent!