Week 9            Language

I’ve given this one a lot of thought, like many of the 52 prompts at first read I think I have nothing and no one to write about – shaking my head.  I got to thinking about puzzles and since I regularly do the daily crossword I remembered my Aunt Bird.  She was born Virginia Horning in Parish, New York on the 19^th of June 1922.  In August of 1947 she married my mother’s brother, Arthur Laforce.  Her life was cut short by what I believe was a brain aneurism at the age of 52.  I was a sophomore in college when she died and it was an enormous loss, not just to me but for her entire family and the many friends she had.

Aunt Bird played the crosswords, I think she liked to play cards too, and I know that one time she had my sister Laurie over at her house and they played a prank on my Uncle Art.  They emptied several of his drawers and replaced the contents with cards from the Sorry game. She was just a lot of fun.

There were several summers when Aunt Bird would rent a camp with her cousin and they would spend a week or two at Panther Lake in Oswego County, N.Y. She would take me with her since her cousin had children and I often felt as though she were my second mother and since she did not have children, I was her surrogate for those trips. I loved those weeks at Panther Lake. One memory I have is a game we played killing mosquitoes.  Aunt Bird offered to pay the kids fifteen cents for each mosquito we killed.  I think it actually worked for all of us – Aunt Bird and the kids.

I remember the drives to and from the camp, she’d play loud country/western music on the radio which seemed so exotic to me, my father seldom if ever allowed us to listen to music in the car.  Aunt Bird loved Patsy Cline; she’d sing along while we tooled down the highway.  I also remember one time there was a military convoy of some sort, probably heading from or to Fort Drum, and as we’d pass a truck load of soldiers, they’d hoot, holler, wave, and gesture as we passed.  Aunt Bird seemed amused by it; I was confused. I was young.

I don’t have a lot of photos of Aunt Bird, I think only two with her and me together.  This one was taken in the church basement, we were having fun, of course. We laughed a lot together. I don’t know the exact date but from the original slide I guessed it was taken in 1967. I would have been 13, she would have been 45.  She was the first person I lost that was so hard and caused so much grief.  My grandmother had died when I was almost ten and that was awful but the death of Bird was different, maybe because I was older, maybe because we were so close.

In many ways it is easier to write about distant ancestors.