From my home in Virginia, it’s about a three hour drive to Altoona where my loving Great Aunt Lillian lives. Aunt Lillian, now in her late nineties, does not know that we are coming to visit. We tend to surprise her with visits, mainly because she is deaf and ninety-eight percent blind. When we visit, we can find Aunt Lillian sitting on the far left of her extra long red and green couch, carefully re-reading letters from a sister or cousin with her magnifying eye lamp. Or many times, we find her visiting her beloved daughter Norma who lived down the hall in the 24-hour care ward.
Traveling at sixty miles per hour, with one mountain always in the foreground, the metropolitan area dissipates and is swallowed up by the rising hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Our car, carrying my mother, father and myself, hugs each mountain curve, regaining composure at every subsequent straight tract. White pines and birches stretch their limbs to the sky on either side of the turnpike as tractor trailers climb forward, and then fly past us on the downward slopes.
Downtrodden tunes of coal miners, Tennessee Whiskey, and white line fever pulse through the car speakers. We are all dispirited for another reason though; Aunt Lillian is broken hearted. It has been about a year since Normie past away, and now, like never before, Aunt Lillian is alone. She has no sight, no hearing, and now, she has no touch; she can no longer feel the love that poured out of Normie every time Normie held her mother’s hand.
We pass through Brunswick, Boonsboro, Rohresville, Amaranth: the town names flash by. Twenty feet up on each side of the road, purplish, maroon rock juts out. It is February; snow is melting and water from underground springs leak from unseen cracks and crevices in the ever crumbling rock. Driving through Everett, then Crystal Springs, we continue to pass boarded up country houses, dairy farms with red barns and two or three silos, and rickety fences made from split logs.
Aunt Lillian is one of the strongest women in my family. In kindergarten, Normie contracted scarlet fever and was left severely paralyzed. Aunt Lillian must have been very worried that her daughter would not have the opportunities that other children had, because every story I have heard of the mother and daughter, have been nothing but stories of love. There must have been many hard times for Normie growing up, but ultimately, her mother Lillian bent over backwards to make sure her daughter experienced as much as she possibly could.
Aunt Lillian’s husband Emmitt owned and operated a grocery store. From what I have pieced together from her stories, he must have worked most of the time to support his wife and daughter. Aunt Lillian was a very talented woman and an even more talented mother. She used all of her heart and soul to entertain Normie, who could not walk for most of her life.
The house that Aunt Lillian lived in when she was married was a two story house. Like most old homes, the bedrooms were on the top floor of the house. Even in her nineties, Aunt Lillian has the endurance of a work horse. This is because she would carry Normie in her arms up and down the stairs, all their life, until her child was put in a nursing home.
In the summer time Aunt Lillian would set Normie outside in a porch swing or on a shady bench in the garden. They would both listen to records, while Normie enjoyed the good weather and Aunt Lillian painted, wrote poems or made greeting cards with calligraphy. Aunt Lillian even trained her pet parakeet to do circus tricks for Normie.
Normie was very interested in President Eisenhower and made a scrap book of news events. She even got to meet the President and show him her scrapbook of him.
No less than an hour from Altoona, Amish country springs up. Had it been a Sunday, our family could have seen the horse-drawn carriages of Amish folk attending or coming home from church, all bundled up in bonnets or top hats and quilts wrapped tightly around them. Since it was mid-morning, they could have been doing any number of things: putting cows to pasture, ferrying horses, tending to their crops, schooling children.
We pass over the bubbling McKee’s and Indian Grave Run, which brings up images of Indians and warriors and even more primitive days gone by than that of the Pennsylvanian Dutch. Sitting in the back seat while my parents chat about friends, jobs, retirement, I often drift off from their conversations. I imagine what the area must have been like before the trees and mountains had been dynamited through to build the massive interstate network.
Nearing Altoona we start to see auto junkyards and movie rental advertisements, signs of the approaching city limits. When we get to the Presbyterian Nursing Home that Aunt Lillian lives in, we find her sitting in her favorite spot on her red and green sofa. Her hands are folded on her lap and she is, undoubtedly thinking about the days of her and Normie’s youth. Today, there is no smile on her face. I look into Aunt Lillian’s eyes, which always sparkle with a warm glow of happiness; but today the sunshine in her eyes is gone. She had no one left to care for; her most important job as a mother had been completed. This is the day I knew that I would never see Aunt Lillian again.
Nothing was worth looking at on the drive home.
