She was savoring and relishing something that gave her delight. Looking back forty years later, I believe she most likely spoke the same words aloud when she was driving alone. I just happened to overhear her gratitude for something that triggered joy in her. I just happened to be sitting on the sidelines of her worship.
I have other piecemeal memories of her. The way she sang, "Yoohoo," when me and my five siblings would enter her home. She sang the same tune when she and Aunt Bu would come over to my family's house. I knew that I knew that I was her favorite of the Carver Kids, and everyone else knew it too. She held the purse strings in her family (she and her two sisters lived together, none ever marrying), and she sometimes spent some of what was in that purse on me. I remember a red bathing suit that was purchased for me while all the Carver Kids were there. It really wasn't fair, but she did it anyway. She was at the hospital when I was born, the story is told, while my dad was at work. Maybe that is why Aunt Helen felt a special bond with me.
She was frugal and opinionated, principled, a horrible cook, sharp, and conservative. A retired physical education teacher, she was slim and agile and measured under five feet tall. Aunt Bu, one of her older sisters, used to bellow, "Merry Christmas!" as we arrived to their home, no matter what month it was. We soon learned she wasn't joking. As dementia worsened, she babbled things that made no sense but babbled them with pleasant feeling and expression. When we drove to day outings, picnics and the like, Aunt Bu read the words on every billboard we drove by out loud. Aunt Helen, long before "Prevention" magazine was a thing, subscribed and tried vitamins and healthful foods that might help her sister. She was always on the lookout for a remedy, hoping the next thing, or the next thing, would bring healing.
When I was engaged to be married, she gave me a silk pouch filled with embroidered fabric handkerchiefs. A beautiful design was woven into each piece of fabric. One by one she unfolded them, telling me which special occasion they were attached to. She got to the last one, held it in her hands, and said, "This is the handkerchief I carried the night I met the only man I ever loved." Her eyes filled with tears, her voice quivered, her lips tightened, and she said no more. After she died, I learned the man's name was Phillip. They had fallen in love over a summer. When summer was over and they returned to college, she learned he had been engaged to be married to another. He wanted to break his engagement to marry Aunt Helen, but she felt that would be wrong. She never loved another.
She always promised me, but never delivered, a train ride wherein we would sit facing backwards. "Someday we will ride on a train, you and I. And we will sit in a rear-facing seat. You see more when you're facing backwards," she told me. "It's the most amazing thing."
My sister Susan, two and a half years older than I, warned me, "Watch out. Aunt Helen is going to give you 'the talk,' just like she did me and Paula. She's going to tell you all about how she started her period on a church picnic." I swore this would not happen to me, that I would avoid this awkward scenario at all costs. But one day when I was twelve, she was helping me clean out my room and opened a small drawer that housed my underwear. A red felt pen for some unknown reason was in the underwear drawer. For another unknown reason its cap had been removed, and the red ink had soaked into the crotch of a pair of underwear.
You really can't make this stuff up.
She saw this as her chance to tell me about when she "became a young lady" and how I also would. Having been warned by my big sisters, I saw it coming and bolted to the bathroom, hiding out until she left my bedroom. She never did get to tell me the story.
Once my family borrowed Aunt Helen's car. She needed it the next morning and didn't want to be a bother to anyone so walked over to our home and drove her car to the store. Meanwhile we woke up and called the police to report a stolen vehicle. Aunt Helen exited Alpha Beta and went to her car, where police officers waited, ready to arrest her for stealing a vehicle. She was eighty. Then there was the time in the same parking lot she made a quick trip into the store, leaving Aunt Bu in the car for a bit. Aunt Helen returned to an empty car and went on a search for her sister. She finally called the police, who found Aunt Bu in the dressing room of a clothing store having a nice conversation with herself while looking in a full-length mirror.
So many stories, the kinds our family tells again and again—those stories that begin with, "Remember when," that change a bit every time and end in a chorus of laughter.
Once in a while I get a longing, a longing that aches for the people I knew and loved in my early years to be able to know the people I know now. I want my kids to know Aunt Helen, my grandma, their two sisters, Carrie and Bertha (Bu). I try to tell them what they were like. God gave me a dream once, shortly after my grandma died and my third child, Karis was born. He let me walk my grandma over to her cradle, where I said, "Grandma, this is my baby girl, Karis." They met and loved each other.
I woke up with a wet face.
My face is wet today as I sit in quiet prayer. My tears are potent with longing to share the people I loved, who are woven into the fabric of my heart, with the people I now love, who are also woven into the fabric my heart. They all make me who I am.
I sit on the loveseat in these early morning candlelit moments, relishing these tears of longing, allowing them to remain on my face awhile. The train moves forward. I hop onto a seat facing backwards, inhale deeply, and enjoy the fragrance of orange blossoms.
