A Few Words About My Aunt Teeny

 

Date: 12 Mar 2003
Time: 06:06:43

Aunt Christine was taken home today from the hospital to the little house in front of Neva’s. Hospice was called and is in attendance every day. There is no reasonable hope that she will recover and the doctors expect that she will die within a week. Aunt Christine is 96 years old and will not reach her 97th birthday on October 20th of this year. I thought that it was fitting I jot down for you some of the things that cross my mind on this day when I have been told she has only a week to live.

To me she was always “Aunt Teeny”, and there was no reduction of honor in that diminutive. She was my Mother’s older sister being almost exactly two years older. As they grew up my Mother and Aunt Teeny became very different people but they were very close to each other — soul-mates as it were. Mother was bright-eyed, joyous, adventuresome, and garrulous. Aunt Teeny was more reserved, perhaps a bit more responsible, more determined and more resigned to what life had to offer. She married at 18 and had a life of unremitting poverty and seven children to rear plus me part of the time. It was not an easy task as the wife of a dry-land farmer in Hale County, Texas, and she, like all of her children, had to put a cotton sack on her shoulder and pull bolls for two months of every year. Often when she was dragging a cotton sack she was six or seven months pregnant. In all of the time of her life over the past 75 years have I heard not one word of complaint from her lips about her lot in life, nor would she permit from anyone a criticism of her husband. She was a great believer in the maxim that every person in the world is responsible for the consequences of his own actions, and she lived that creed and taught it to her children and to me.

No matter how bad things got — and they were pretty bad in the 1932 to 1938 period. There were many times when breakfast was corn meal mush and that strictly rationed by quantity. I don’t mean corn meal mush with butter and salt and pepper and milk. I mean corn meal mush. Coffee was sometimes powdered burned toast mixed with water. A potato sandwich could easily be lunch. It was two miles from the dry-land farm to Ellen School where her kids got to go after cotton-picking time, and sometimes there was enough money from cotton picking for them to get a pair of shoes. And sometimes there wasn’t, and they had to walk to Ellen barefoot in the snow. - Despite all this and many other things I was always welcome at Aunt Teeny’s. It was a while before I had the good sense to not talk about my toys or where I had been or about the movies on Saturday or all of the many things that I had that her children did not have. I was, I am sure an insufferable little prig and it would be only fair if they all hated me - but they didn’t. They all loved me and doted on me and listened to my stories with wide eyes and thought I was wonderful and when I would get hurt as boys do on farms occasionally, Aunt Teeny would hold me close and rock me in the one rocking chair with my legs so long that they clumped on the floor as she rocked.

Aunt Teeny never punished me. Normally in a summer I would spend three weeks on their farm. Aunt Teeny and Uncle Ott (Arthur) worked at the creamery in Plainview on Saturday from 9 AM until 9 PM, and it took about an hour to get from their farm to work. So from about 8AM until 10PM we seven kids were alone on the farm unsupervised by adults. Aunt Teeny would lay out a detailed work plan on the theory that an idle mind was the Devil’s workshop, and we all knew that if we didn’t do the work that Naoma (the oldest girl) and Denver (the oldest boy) would get a licking on Saturday night about ten when Aunt Teeny returned from the Creamery - but not me. She told me once when I begged her to whip me instead of Denver that I was hers to love but not hers to punish. Even through all that her kids still loved me and still do. I didn’t deserve it.

Aunt Teeny and my Mother shared a trait that I think must be rare. If any of us kids or anyone else that they loved did something really bad or even not in line with their concept of what was best for them or society they could make that fact go away. I don’t mean just to ignore it, they could make it cease to exist. Both Mother and Aunt Teeny were fundamental religionists, as was just about everyone I knew as a child, but neither of them were proselytizing Christians. There are at least three homosexuals in the family that I know about counting Frank, but not to Mother or Aunt Teeny. They refused to recognize sin as a part of the life of those they loved. When two different grandsons of Aunt Teeny went to prison (forgery and a meth lab), Aunt Teeny would talk about them casually; but the subject of their crime was never mentioned in her presence, nor did she ever talk about it. If there was any dominant trait in Aunt Teeny’s character, it was that she forgave deeply, not just on the surface. Her love was 100% unconditional and absolute.

I will always be thankful that all seven of Aunt Teeny’s children became responsible, accountable and relatively prosperous middle class citizens. Not one of them ever spent a day in jail that I know of and they were the joy of her old age — along with me.

I will always be grateful that I knew my Aunt Teeny and experienced a little bit of her glorious optimism about life. I can hear her say now, “Things will be all right kids, if we just keep working our way through this,” and then she would give us all a big hug. And there is nothing grim about my Aunt Teeny. She will say it with a laugh.