It’s funny what sparks your memories – memories that have
lain dead and forgotten for years. Blurry memories, almost as if they were
dreams. Happy memories of when the hardest thing in your life was a spelling
test on Fridays. The kind of memories that make you wish you could go back to
them.
I had one of those moments this week when Aaron was telling
me he got his son Hudson one of those John Deere tractors you can pedal for
Hudson’s birthday. With Aaron the triumph was getting it on Craig’s list for
$40, although he’ll enjoy watching his son play with it for hours. For me, it
was a memory…
I wasn’t a whole lot older than Hudson and though I’m a
girl, I liked those toy tractors you could pedal, too. But the one I pedaled
wasn’t a John Deere. It wasn’t green. It wasn’t even plastic. It was completely
metal and who knows what color it had been – red, probably. By the time I
pedaled around on it, it was a bit rusty. If I had fallen and scratched myself
on it, it would have required a trip to the doctor and a tetanus shot. Except
my parents weren’t those kind of people (and, what do you know, I’m perfectly
healthy anyhow). So, my sister and I were allowed to ride it with pleasure down
the broken sidewalk in the old neighborhood out in the middle of no-where in
Tennessee. I’ll even confess, I hogged it. That was easy to do when Katey was
just a toddler and I was old enough to go to school.
It belonged to Aunt Brownie. And, yes, that was her real
name. (I thought the dessert was named after her.) As a little girl of five or
six, I thought Aunt Brownie was at least 200 years old and had probably known
Robert E. Lee if not George Washington. I couldn’t have been far from wrong
because even though I didn’t yet understand all the layers of family relations,
I knew she was a greater aunt than any other aunt anyone else had. Meaning, she
was my grandmother’s aunt. Actually, Aunt Brownie was 73 years older than me
almost to the day. I was born the day after her 73rd birthday.
Because of that, she never forgot my birthday and I had a special kinship with
her.
Aunt Brownie had married. I knew that man’s name was Jack,
but he died before I was born so I never knew him. They were unable to have
children, so Aunt Brownie’s nieces and nephews, great nieces and nephews and
great-great nieces and nephews were her kids. So, I was not the first
five-year-old to cheat her sister out of a ride on that wonderful pedaled tractor.
Aunt Brownie lived in an old house in a neighborhood out somewhere probably not
far from my own home in Tennessee, but when you’re five it takes “forever” to
get anywhere. I have faint memories of the house. What I remember the most is
you drove past woods where a sinkhole was located to get there. I never could
grasp the idea of a hole in the ground with no bottom. Surely there had to be a
bottom. Why did no one tried to find it? Or, would you just keep falling until
you popped up in China? Sinkholes are scary things…
As for Aunt Brownie herself, I thought she lived up her to
her name. She was sweet. She loved having us visit. She gave me a cloth stuffed
rabbit I still have. She sent me birthday cards even when I moved away. And
when she died when I was thirteen years old, I cried. And I wondered if she
still had that pedaled tractor.
This fall it will be twenty years since Aunt Brownie died,
but she is still remembered. Happy memories. A thing to be truly grateful for.
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