The Wintering Back Then

My mother's sister and I once lived together for a winter. I mean, I moved in with my aunt when I was 22. I will never forget it though the details are mundane. My mother, the great beauty and the great philosopher, was in California for the year teaching. My sisters both lived in Boston with their boyfriends. And I was lost, as I often am in this world. My aunt said, "Why don't you stay with me?" And I moved right in. a year later, when I called her, crying, she said, "oh why don't you come home honey?" and I will never forget that either. I can hardly write about her, and it has been over 30 years since she died.
We were women conspirators sometimes. We drove to the store down the mountain in her Oldsmobile; she bought groceries for the week and I bought a giant Cadbury chocolate bar which back in the 1970's was the deluxe expensive chocolate in Vermont. She always stopped at the giant Hersheys bars and debated. "Should I get one?" she would ask the aisle, and the aisle would generally say OK, but once I remember she felt she couldn't. My uncle did not make a lot of money then, they were rather poor I guess, though they had a nice house and land in the country and they played golf right on their lawn. I didn't realize then....anything much. I know so much now and it is of no use. Everyone I loved is dead or grown up and far from me. But she turned to me that day and said,
"I better not. We can't afford it."
I took my candy to the register saying, "I'll buy it for you..." several times, but she said no no I should keep my money. Still, I recall she did let me, or she did buy it. Because we ate them together later, looking out at the bird feeder and all her flocks of grosbeaks.

There are no grosbeak flocks in Vermont anymore. In the 1970's, hundreds would gather around my feeders which I always set up like my aunt had, and they would feed all winter there. Mostly they were yellow grosbeaks, but some were rose. I took hundreds of pictures with my Minolta camera and developed them, but just as with memories, they never conveyed the powerful sight of enormous Canadian crowds hovering in my yard. It was Messianic. It was shattering and beautiful and with it came huge responsibility, something I was late to learn.

My aunt and I had things in common. We were both short, we were both the youngest in our family, and we both suffered at the hands of my mother, the great philosopher and beauty. We also both smoked cigarettes and were both chided constantly by my mother.
"Oh you're going to die of lung cancer," mother would tell her sister. "It makes you look OLD. It ruins your skin. It isn't pretty it's ugly."
My aunt would nod her head and rub the floor back and forth with her foot, nodding and saying "I know. I know."
"Why can't you quit? I smoked for a year and then one day I thought, 'hey I don't need this!' and I quit, bam, just like that. Can't you quit? Please? For me?" My aunt would nod, and finally mother would find something else to say. "Hey did you know I won a Gugenheim?" she would ask.
My aunt congratulated her. "Now save your money this time. Don't go giving it to your students or your kids like you always do. Save it. Because" but my aunt never got to finish what she began with mother, because mother had so much to say and was so enthusiastic.
"I have a present for you," mother would interrupt, "well, it's just a book... an anthology of women philosophers. I'm in it."

My aunt smoked Camels and I smoked Marlboro's. She bought one carton of Camels and one carton of Lucky Strikes each week. My uncle smoked Lucky Strikes. I bought mine by the pack. Not because cartons were expensive, they weren't back then. Only because I planned on quitting before I smoked another ten packs. But of course I never did. My aunt quit when she was dying of lung cancer.
When they were young, my mother says my aunt got pregnant and my grandmother made her marry my uncle. I don't know if it is true, but mother says she remembers clearly how her mother got on the train with my aunt and took her out to wherever it was my uncle was stationed before the war and insisted they marry. My grandmother was a tall imposing woman with red hair that became white and which she wore piled on her head in a bun. When she took it down at night it was longer than my mothers. The only women who ever cut their hair in my family were my oldest sister and my aunt. The rest of us still have long hair to our waists, and we all dyed it red or brown when it grew in white. But my aunt for some reason kept hers shorter and curled it.
When the husbands of the sisters returned from world war two, my aunts husband was injured. But he lived and he stayed married to my aunt until the day she died. My mothers husband, my father, died abruptly at the end of the 1950'a and she never remarried. This was the only thing my aunt trumped my mother on. My mother did not get along my uncle.

I was 22 when I lived with my aunt and uncle and it was the first married couple I really saw being married. He got up early in the morning and went to work every day, and my aunt fed the birds and swept the house and did the dishes and prepared dinner. They were the model couple of the 1950's era and they slept in side by side twin beds just like Dick Van Dyke and his wife on TV. They always had black short haired dogs that barked whenever someone drove in the driveway to visit. They had a big TV and my uncle sat in a lazy boy recliner. Every night, when he came home from work, my aunt would set the round wooden table for dinner. It had four matching chairs and was in a nook off the kitchen. And every night my uncle would groan when he sat down and say, "We're having that again??" to whatever she cooked. Each meal began with little round wooden salad bowls full of head lettuce and shredded carrot and there were several different bottles of Viva! dressing on the table to choose from. Blue cheese, Ranch, or Italian. Then she would serve us each a plate with kilbassa sausage and creamed corn or potatoes au gratin or some similar packaged delight from the Grand Union. We could have been the Cleaver Family except that my uncle made hilarious sarcastic jokes all through the meal and my aunt only half smiled and sighed. I was their audience and I laughed and clapped with enthusiasm.

At the end of the winter, I moved out, and met a man and fell in love. It was only a year or so later that my aunt found out she had lung cancer. I was pregnant and living near by. Sometimes I would walk down to see her... it was about two miles and I remember making the trek once in a blizzard. When I got there, she had moved down to the guest room and I was shocked to see she wore a wig and there were red numbers high on her forehead, though I don't know why...it must have had to do with the radiation treatment. One time I offered to cook her an egg. "She won't eat," my uncle said.

I still eat giant chocolate bars, though now they are gourmet chocolate. I smoke organic cigarettes. And I still play the same two deck solitaire card game that I taught my aunt. We would sit at her round wooden table with the matching chairs in the kitchen nook overlooking the bird feeder where hundreds of grosbeaks were feeding, and we would each play our own game. We concentrated very hard on our games and often an hour would pass before we would move a single card, but we almost never lost. The snow would fall outside the window, my aunt would add a log to the fireplace, the tea kettle was always whistling, we were always drinking Salada tea and reading our fortunes on the little white cards that dangled from the tea bag. We never spoke of my being lost or her being lost either. We just concentrated on winning the double deck card game. We just smoked, and concentrated, and our souls danced together in that place where souls are free.