Preserving the Family Stories

Here we are, Sis (second from left) and I (far right) visiting with our cousin, Susan (far left) and Auntie Eleanor (third from left, next to me) last fall in Little Compton, RI. The house behind us is Auntie Eleanor's and the roof - and siding shingles - look like they haven't been changed since I was a child, visiting her 50 years ago. Auntie Eleanor is 96 years old now, and to tell the truth, Sis and I hadn't seen her when we did this last "grand tour" for more than 20 years. Closer, actually, to 30. Omigosh! More than 30! The last time I saw Auntie Eleanor was at my Dad's funeral in 1974. She was just a spring chicken, then. She was very pleased to have us visit, and smiled happily as we sat there in her unchanged parlor - everything a little dusty, and with the dark patina of age. Her home, unlike my childhood recollections, is a very small "Cape Codder" - kitchen, pantry and bathroom across the back of the house with a central entranceway, and living room and dining room across the front separated by a small front entrance with stairs leading to four small upstairs bedrooms with low slanted ceilings. As children, we never went in the front door, and I don't believe anyone else ever used it, either. The house is situated at the bottom of a hill with a dirt/stone road running down to it. It's a family compound, really - a private road with only related folks allowed to build houses there. But, unlike the Kennedy compound, these house are quite modest, although those built more recently by grandchildren are a little more spacious and upscale, so to speak. But, there's still plenty of land between each house - land, and trees and lovely, lush and tangled shrubs, including a lot of wild grape vines and currant bushes. I remember Auntie Eleanor's currant jellies well, and with relish. But the reason we all used the back door at Auntie Eleanor's is because they built the house with it's back to the road. The front of the house just faces a narrow "front" yard surrounded by shrubs and bushes and the like, with only a small dirt path winding around to access the road at the back of the house. My cousin Susan and her husband have since built their house across from the "front" of Auntie Eleanor's, with plenty of space, bushes, trees and even a small field and driveway separating them.


Auntie Eleanor is quite fragile now, and her mind wanders a bit - she has forgotten that so many of her contemporaries have died, and she remembers visiting with so-and-so "last week" when it was really a few decades ago, but it was still really quite lovely to see her again, and lovely, if a little surprising, to see how unchanged her house is. I suspect it's because she wants it that way, because she certainly has grown children - some of whom are older than I am - whom I'm sure would oversee renovations if she wanted them done. But no, everything is the same - and considerably worse for the wear, but overflowing, I'm sure, with memories both good and bad, as with all families and lives.


There's an old piano on one wall in the dining room, and the top overflows with family pictures. Eleanor as a young and beautiful woman in period dress, her handsome husband in his Army uniform - for years and years, now, I've thought that our Uncle was a "Navy man", and at least an admiral or of some elevated rank, but no - there he was on the wall in a place of honor, dressed in his khakis. And, on his gravestone, located across town in an old cemetery where my grandmother and many other family members are buried, there is a brass plaque identifying him as "private first class" in the United States Army. I couldn't help but contrast and compare how differently the service men and women of today are looked at. Back in my Uncle's era, soldiering was a pround and honorable thing. Auntie Eleanor and my Uncle had a genuine love affair, I believe. She remains wild about him to this day.

I was the "baby" of my family. My sister was 12 and my brother fourteen when I was born. My mother was a nurse who had just gotten back into the workforce, doing what she loved when she discovered that I was on the way. My father had insisted that she stay home with my brother and sister until they hit their teenaged years, and now, at 40, she wasn't having any of that! So, I had an Irish "nanny", whose family became as close to me as mine was - except for my sister. When my sister wasn't in school, she carried me about on her hip everywhere she went. We joke about that today, as I've turned out to be a good four inches taller than she is, and have always been bigger boned and more gangly altogether. She also reminds me that she carried me until my feet started dragging on the ground, and I still didn't want to be put down.

Oddly, after I got married, my sister moved down south to Florida with her second husband, and I rarely saw her for more than 30 years. Our kids don't even know each other very well; they only visited with each other three or four times in all the time they were growing up. And her children, of course, were older than mine - until she and her second husband had two together who are close in age to my two older girls. (I have four children: three girls, ages 39, 37 and 30, and a son 27.)

Now, with children grown, my sister and I have made it an absolute "must" that we get together at least once every year, and sometimes a little more frequently than that. We've missed a lot of each other's lives, but we're not planning on missing what we have left.

That's all for now.

Z