Aunt Grace was 4'8" tall. She was 5 feet around. When she sat, her feet did not touch the ground, and the tiny black hat sat on her head. It was the one she had inherited from Uncle Harry's grandmother. Her hair was black as coal, save for the fewa gray hairs that had appeared, and her shoes were those sensible ones that women of a certain age wore. The laces were black, the leather was black, and the heels were very fat. She always sat at the front of her chair with her hands folded in her lap, and she always smiled a saintly smile.
She and Uncle Harry had joined a church sometime late in life. They were well-known in our little community. They attended every funeral no matter what church it was held in. If you died and Grace and Harry didn't show up for the food and the comfortable pews, something was very wrong. They were always there. They would visit sick people in the hospital that they did not know. (Our hospital was 30-40 miles away.) They probably had never had a conversation with them before. Nurses would ask them to leave after visiting hours. The patients were exhausted.
Uncle Harry was my great-grandmother's son. He wore a winter coat year-round, and if he hugged you, you stayed hugged for a very long time. The bruises took a while to heal. He had worked at the same job all of his life. All the furniture in his house was his mother's.
Where they began courting is a mystery. They had no children but did adopt a child and she came to visit them occasionally.
I think Aunt Grace drove because Uncle Harry was...well...Uncle Harry. She sat on cushions so she could see through the steering wheel. People just stayed out of her way as she wove down the road. The car seemed to be driving itself.
I had a friend who said she enjoyed attending funerals and hearing the stories of perfect strangers' lives. She was curious and perhaps a little nosy. I suppose she liked the food too. Aunt Grace and Uncle Harry would have been her special friends.
Our family celebrated Memorial Day with family. Aunt Grace and Uncle Harry always made it to the picnic. I don't recall seeing them at the cemetery. The place was visited just once a year, so cleaning the overgrown gravesites with last year's dried lilac stems still in the fruit jars was a big job. We brought tubs of lilacs and used the jars left over from last year as vases. Nothing went to waste.
As a child, I thought we were perfectly normal, but looking back, I have to wonder.
We had cousins who would also show up on Memorial Day. My grandmother speculated about their arrival every year. It wasn't her dream come true when they did. She swore that she was going to pull the blinds and hide, but she never did. The cousins' daughter was boisterous. She was a heavy woman who wore full-circle skirts and turned cartwheels on Grandma's front lawn. Grandmother nearly died of embarrassment. This was in 1950.
My cousins and I were simply thrilled with the excitement. So on Memorial Day, Uncle Harry in his overcoat and Aunt Grace in Great-grandmother's black hat, along with the out- of-town Cousins and the daughter with the big skirt, would gather with the rest of us to talk about dead relatives. We would eat fried chicken, potato salad, and, if we were lucky, angel cake.
Honestly we loved it. My cousins and I didn't leave. We didn't want to miss a single minute!
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