My Aunt Mary Rose, by Kathleen Dowling

 

My mother enters the kitchen through the back door, the basket balanced on her hip, the first load of laundry washed and hung on the clothesline.

            "Kathleen, I want you to go over your aunt's today and help her."

            My ever-so-compliant-seven-year-old self agrees immediately while my more inquisitive self wonders, "What is this all about? What about my chores here, or entertaining my little brother, watching my baby sister?" I don't know this aunt, my mother's older sister, very well, but she is always kind to me when we visit.  I start out on this hot summer morning in late June, happy as only a child with no worries or responsibilities can be. Three streets away from our new house in Weymouth stands 14 Wildwood Road, originally my grandmother's cottage, where my Aunt Mary Rose and her family have lived since the winter of 1940. 

            That first morning she seemed surprised by my arrival.  Sitting before a large window in her dining room, she was working on something, small pieces of colorful fabric spread on a large table.  Looking up, my Aunt Mary Rose smiled through her greeting, "Oh, hello dear."

            I am sure my mother arranged my visit.  I would learn that even if I told my aunt when I would return, she always seemed surprised and delighted when I appeared at the back screen door, a door that I never seemed to be able to close tightly.  She never commented that it remained open several inches the whole day.

            While she concentrated on the fabric swatches, I started washing dishes in the sink, and when she realized what I was doing, she jumped up.

            "Don't bother with those. They're always dishes to do.  Let's do something else."

            Something Else.  What was that?  On that first day, and all the days following, I learned not everyone made the beds, cleaned the kitchen with everyone dressed for the day before 9 o'clock. At 14 Wildwood Road, you could put off tasks and do what you wanted to do. 

            On my early visits, I offered to wash the dishes, to dust or sweep, but Aunt Mary Rose would have none of that.  She was always in the middle of a project when I arrived so that's what we did.  Sometimes this meant using a tool - a hammer, a putty knife, pruning shears - that was off-limits to me in my house per my mother's safety rules.  My aunt's instructions were always given in an even voice, made husky perhaps from cigarettes.  She never commented on my inexperience with hand tools, oil paints, varnish, or crochet hooks, and I don't remember feeling embarrassed at those lapses in my city upbringing.  She was artistic, painting, working with clay, interested in creating.  She cooked for sustenance, and housework didn't interest her, and she was almost magical to me.  She was a dreamer, sharing easily what she was thinking, spending hours on a puzzle or a project, unlike any other woman in my family.  She was a great storyteller, a good listener.

            In the far left corner of the backyard was a screen house, packed with books and puzzles, which were often damp from the night air or the summer rain.  Sometimes we spent the morning working on one of the puzzles stored high in the eaves, or one she had been working on for several days.  When she realized my love for reading, she told me to bring a book "the next time you visit."  That first summer, the one between second and third grade, I read the "Trixie Belden" series. I read to her, the simple plots lulling her to sleep for a few minutes.

            I knew my mother expected me to help my aunt with chores, to make her life easier.  I knew she would not be happy with mornings spent in the screen house while dishes were left in the sink so I never shared what we did during those summer days.  I never told we often walked through the old grave yard on Lambert Avenue where some of the vaults had been vandalized, and you could see the bones if you walked in far enough, which we did. My eyes were better than hers to read the inscriptions, but her imagination was better than mine to conjure up the stories of who was buried or what happened.  Walks along Morningside Path to Whitman's Pond, she thought about who lived here before us.  She believed in ghosts, and I was right there with her.  One day, and who knows how, my mother found out the top of the pressure cooker had blown off while I was making donuts with Aunt Mary Rose.  That almost ended my solo visits there.  

            Bits of conversations come back to me.  She told me when she couldn't sleep at night, she sat outside in a wooden swing her oldest son had made for her in the sloping front yard. I asked her if she dreamed while swinging, and she told me she was always dreaming. I discovered what others thought of her didn't matter, and she never judged others. Sometimes a friend would drop in, smoking cigarettes with her, including me in the conversation as if I had something important to contribute.  One friend, Helen, complained of a lazy husband who smoked cigars and a son who was always in trouble.  Aunt Mary Rose never commented and never pressed her for details. Over many visits, I understood her friend wasn't looking for advice; she just wanted someone to listen to her.

            She gave me the same close attention, her blue eyes never leaving my face. We talked about the night sky, who I might get for a teacher in the fall, my interest in becoming the Queen of England, my troubles with a girl up the street, what frightened me, what frightened her. She thought it was good to cry when you were sad and agreed with my mother that you needed to be brave at the dentist.

            She asked my opinion.  "What can you pray for?"..."Is it too rainy to go for a walk?"..."Should we have French toast for lunch?..."Does this need pruning?" She was the only adult who asked me questions, encouraged me to say some of what I was thinking out loud, and considered my answers seriously.     

            There were some days she was in bed when I arrived, her head turned to the window, looking toward her garden.  I knew she wasn't sick, and I would read to her, or we would just talk until she decided to get up.

No matter the weather, at some point during the day, we would work in her gardens, gardens my grandmother had started over twenty-five years before.  My aunt seemed to have a personal relationship with plants; she taught me to get my hands into the soil and smell the earth, clean and pure.  She encouraged me to get my hands dirty and never worried about my clothes. She loved the earthy smell of geraniums and would hold a plant she had wintered over to my nose, breathing deeply before we replanted it.  "Smell this!"

            When my husband and I moved to our house in 1975, my mother suggested I take cuttings from my aunt's garden.  I didn't know what I was doing, and I planted everything in a far corner of our yard.  A weigela bush, rose campion, and something my mother called, "goat's beard,” all original plants from my grandmother's garden, my connection to her, my aunt, and my mother, have survived despite me.     

            When I first started walking to Wildwood Road by myself, I was 7, and she was 47. She had lived in her home for 15 years then, raising six children with her husband. When I visited those first summers, her husband, Roy, and the four children who still lived at home were at work.  My visits slowed down by the time I was in junior high, and by then, all her children were out of the house.  During one of those visits, she wrote in my autograph book, "Enjoy the age you are as you will be that age a very short time."

            When I knew her best, she was the only woman in my life who was her own person, a free spirit, able to live in the moment.

            By the time I was in high school, I understood her life had been challenging, six children born within eight years.  How had they all fit in the cottage?  She had been married only a few weeks when her mother was killed by a drunk driver returning home to Dorchester from the cottage in 1931. My mother's love for her matched mine, and her stories about her sister reflected that love, her respect for how hard MaRose, as she called her, had worked raising her children, her admiration for all her talents, and her annoyance at anyone who dared not to appreciate her.

            One of my favorite stories involved her dating in the 1920's, requiring my mother or her older sister, my Aunt Kay, to greet a suitor at the front door while my aunt allegedly skipped out the back with a different beau. What explanations did these twelve and thirteen-year-old girls give to these young men? I am guessing my Aunt Kay was better at this than my mother. My mother told me young men just came calling for her after supper all the time because she was beautiful, spontaneous, different from all the other Irish Catholic girls in the neighborhood. According to my mother, my grandmother finally issued a decree:  make up your mind and choose one.  She chose Roy Martin.

            My mother sent me that first day to be a "mother's helper."   Instead, over several summers, I lived adventures unlike anything at home, learned the importance of patience, listening, and thinking about life differently.  Yet, I remain my mother's daughter:  wired for work before play, a "to do" list always running in my head, completing just one more thing before I sit down. When I decide, though, just to read a book for the afternoon, or talk to my houseplants, or look up at the clouds for a few minutes, or start a puzzle, that's my Aunt Mary Rose's legacy to me. "Let's do something else."