Got to thinking..

Thinking can be a dangerous thing, especially when one does not have someone to bounce their thinking off of. But, for some reason or other, I began thinking about one of my favorite great aunts - Louella. Great Southern name, I think. Anyway, Aunt Lou, as we called her, was always old to me. A tall, skinny woman who had a morbid fear of starving to death. She didn't eat much when she did eat, but once her sister, with whom she lived came back from town early and saw Aunt Lou out in the garden bent over a hoe or a pick and digging in the garden. Her sister crept around the corner of the house just to see what Aunt Lou was doing. It seems she was "grubbing" potatoes and putting them a bushel basket and carrying them down into the cellar.

Aunt Sister just abided her time until the next time that Aunt Lou decided to take the bus into town. Then she went to the garden to see the damage. It seems Aunt Lou had been careful to grub potatoes here and there and cover up the holes she had left. Then Aunt Sister went into the cellar (it only had an outside door) and it was quite a while before she found the mother lode. Aunt Lou had apparently dug a cave out of one of the dirt walls (over the years, presumably) and had stored fresh vegetables from the garden there. It took Aunt Sister a while to find the cave, for it had been elaborately covered up with cardboard, shelving and fruit jars.

The vegetables were mostly fodder for the compost pile by this time, for Aunt Lou really never had any use for the extra food, since Aunt Sister kept her fed well. But there was her cache, filled with rotting vegetables. And to get Aunt Lou to do any real work around the house was like pulling teeth.

Aunt Lou was a masterful pianist. She played, as we used to say, "by ear," and could play anything she had ever heard, from Beethoven to modern jazz. But she only played for company - playing the piano, she said was "too much like work."

Once on a visit to the country and their farm, I asked Aunt Lou what sort of books did she like to read. She would take the bus into town to the library once a week and check out all the books she was allowed and bring them home and read them and then make the same sort of trip the next week. Well, this toothless, string bean of woman, wearing a sleeveless flower sack dress with sandals and a "do-rag" answered me by saying she "liked mostly 'friction' books - not 'science friction', just plain ol' friction." Aunt Lou never got married, not ever showed any interest in doing so. Hence, she lived with one sibling or another after the parents were dead.

My grandmother tells the tale of when Aunt Lou lived with them and ate too many little green apples and got a fierce stomach ache. Well, grandmother was one quarter Native American and knew some home remedies that would put a horse on its side. She was also quite a stout woman. She delighted in telling the tale of forcing Aunt Lou to drink some concoction that made her throw up the those little green apples, by hold her down on the floor and forcing her to swallow the stuff.

No one knew how old Aunt Lou was for she had most likely stolen the family Bible long before her death. But as a grand nephew, I was called home to be a pall bearer at her funeral. I recall how fitting it was that as her casket was being lowered into her final resting place, the black high school marching band was practicing its drills not too far away and was playing "When the Saints Go Marching In," in such a marvelously jazzed up way, that I could practically see Aunt Lou sitting at her old upright, pounding on the keys to the same tune.

Bro. Hardy