I've Been Thinking...

I've Been Thinking...

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I've Been Thinking...
I've Been Thinking...
The Auntie Club

The Auntie Club

A memory and a grateful recognition

Elizabeth Berg's avatar
Elizabeth Berg
Oct 02, 2023
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I've Been Thinking...
I've Been Thinking...
The Auntie Club
16
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four person hands wrap around shoulders while looking at sunset
Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash

There they all are, my mother and her four sisters, lined up along the side of the swimming pool, a perk of the building where two of them—widows, now— live as roommates. (Imagine that— growing up together, then moving into their separate lives of marriage and child rearing, then coming to live together again— which of them in their red-lipsticked, confident 30s would have predicted this?) The women are wearing shorts or pedal pushers and sherbet- colored summer tops, and they are dangling their legs in the water while they watch over an assortment of grandchildren, who swim and splash in the water and call out over and over, “Grandma! Grandma! WATCH me!”

They are all old now, at least in my twenty-something eyes; they are in their 60s and 70s. I am glad to be in their company, as I have been for as long as I can remember. As an army brat who moved often, I haven’t had the privilege of seeing them as often as my cousins, who live near them, but I have seen them enough that certain memories have been imprinted on my brain: Aunt Lala’s sweet smelling, line-dried sheets, her toilet with a pull chain, the tin pan in the kitchen sink where we washed up after dinner using Ivory soap (it floats), her terrifying wringer washer. The lunches she served to her five kids and me, which always concluded with a chocolate bar wrapped in dark green paper, and each of us got our OWN.

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