I remember Aunt Myrt’s mole on her chin—it was big but
not obtrusive; if anything, it added to her charm, making her look like a
welcoming peasant mother of the sort you would love and who would serve you
cookies and conversation (which she often did in abundance!).
I remember so well her beautiful spirit and
her kindness—she was the one who shared my grief over my grandmother’s death
most profoundly. It was she with my maternal grandmother and father who had the task of raising me from around four months old when my mother left. Before I was in kindergarten, she was the one I spent mornings with so that my grandmother, Mom Pete (as she was called by many, although her name was Helen) could do her housework and have quiet time (not that I was ever that noisy or much trouble, as Aunt Myrt used to like to tell me). When I went to first grade, I was right around the corner from her house and I and my cousin Eric Scripp (who was in sixth grade) would go to her house for lunch.
Aunt Myrt's was always a soft place for me to land. She and my grandmother were very close; two sisters born just over a year apart (Myrt was older, from March 16th, 1903 to Helen's August 10th, 1904) who cared mutually for each other's children and grandchildren, and helped each other through the various sots and thralls of life, including the depression and lengthy widowhoods after long and happy marriages. (I asked Aunt Myrt once why she did not date after her husband Jake died; she said that she had happily dealt with having a man around for years, and now didn't need the bother.) My Dad says that, amazingly, he never remembers them disagreeing or arguing about anything.
When my grandmother first had her debilitating stroke (I was ten at the time; 1978), Myrt tried to stay with us and take care of her, even though she was older and not in perfect shape herself. It was too much; Dad and her daughters told her that they would have to get help in for Mom Pete, but that she would be welcome to be there as much as she wanted to keep her sister company and help in things within her ken, like cooking (she was a great cook). I think hardly a day passed that she wasn't either there or calling on the phone and talking to her sister. She was so very faithful!
I remember her strength, which often came out in the guise of stubbornness, as well—when she was sick with a cold in her late eighties (after boasting for years
that she never got a cold), she refused to eat because
her daughter Louise was, as she said, “too fussy.” Louise called me, I came down, and Louise went back over to house to have a rest herself. As Louise walked across the street to her own home (Myrt at this point lived in a trailer across from her daughter, moving from a two-story house when her hip got too bad for her to manage the stairs), Aunt Myrt followed her with her eyes out the front window, then immediately went
into her kitchen and fixed herself something to eat (fried potatoes and onions, I
believe, which was her favorite back then); then, she took the nap that Louise had wanted her to take. I am thankful that Aunt Myrt never found out that I was in cahoots with Louise and Marian (another daughter who lived nearby) to get Aunt Myrt to eat and to rest, or I would have had an earful!
Myrt met my wife twice--once when a group of us came home from college to the town carnival and she was sitting outside on her porch behind the bandstand to listen to and enjoy the live country music and visit with all the people who walked by going back to their cars. The other time was just in her home with Dad, Angie and me. She liked Angie a lot, and actually thought we had already married, and was pleased. More importantly, she told me that my grandmother would have approved of Angie; of that she would know better than anyone. Myrt always promised that she would dance at my wedding, and somehow on our date in heaven, I think she was (probably a polka, as that was her favorite dance and one that she taught me as a teenager).
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