Celebrating Family, Aunt Mary and Southern Indiana

Celebrating Family, Aunt Mary and Southern Indiana

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My bag is packed. Soon I will be on an airplane with my cousin Shirley from Harlem and my cousin Maxine, who lives in Helena. Our destination is Louisville, Kentucky. We’ll pick up a rental car, cross the Ohio River and drive the winding River Road to Elizabeth, Indiana and out into the country toward Laconia and our Aunt Mary. We go to join with Indiana family to celebrate Aunt Mary’s ninety-eighth birthday.

When I return to Indiana, I return to my first home, to a reunion with Indiana kinfolk, and to refresh my love for southern Indiana.  Southern Indiana is different from the flat land of the industrial north and the agrarian center of the state. Geography here centers along the rugged hills above the Ohio River, the red clay countryside, dotted with tobacco fields, small subsistence farms and tiny towns. The land makes the people and these people are warm hearted and friendly.

Traveling with my Montana cousins is a bonus. Uncle Jim was the first of our family to discover Montana. My Dad, Paul, followed a few years later. My northern cousins and I did not grow up together. By the time my family moved to Harlem, they were off to college. I was still in junior high. Our travels to reunions with Indiana family have given us a chance to know one another. On the road we exchange our own family stories, compare notes and speculate about our fathers’ growing-up years.

Our Aunt Mary, a gentle lady, has long been the family matriarch. When she was a child, her farm family always had food but no money. She wore clothes to school made from my Grandmother’s dresses and cut-down coats. But she and every one of her siblings finished high school. Graduation from high school during the Great Depression was a major accomplishment. After graduation she married my Uncle Paul. They bought a near-by farm in the hills near the Ohio River and raised ten children.  Aunt Mary is the repository of our family history. She holds a wealth of community stories, and is murder at the card table. This week she marks her ninety-eighth birthday.

On Saturday, family and friends will gather at the grade school cafeteria. All Aunt Mary’s children, grand-children, great-grandchildren and great-great- grandchildren will be there, along with many nieces and nephews and their families. We’ll fill up on mountains of fried chicken, steaming corn on the cob and Aunt Dixie’s famous coconut cake. We will swill gallons of iced tea, partake of hugs and kisses all around, pose for hundreds of photos and afterwards collapse back at Aunt Mary’s brick house on the hill.

There we will do what we all do best—talk, eat and play cards. We’ll ask questions and soak up the clues to family mysteries.  Aunt Mary thinks it is her job to feed us more than we can eat. We will revolve around the card table where sweet Aunt Mary, showing no mercy, regularly whomps our butts, no matter what the game. Even when we deal from a stack of five decks, Aunt Mary knows where every card lies, who played what and which card has not yet been played.  During our last visit we Montana cousins struggled to learn the rudiments of Euchre. This year we intend to master the game.

We’ll talk family. And we’ll talk politics. Or perhaps I should say we’ll listen politics. Aunt Mary knows the history of every president, who was in Congress, what bills were passed, the goofs and the goods on all. This woman with a high school education regularly shames us with her knowledge and her memory.      

We’ll spend time with our Indiana cousins, cementing those bonds more tightly. This year my Indiana cousin Shirley and I have arranged to spend special time renewing our own ties. Although only two years my senior, when I was a rather lost little girl, Indiana Shirley took me in hand and taught me family values of responsibility and service; basic tenets of life.  Through distance and time we drifted apart, so I am excited to have this chance to reconnect with her.

We will pile into cars to visit King’s Cemetery where many of the Ashton family pioneers are buried.  It sits above Tobacco Landing, a post established by our merchant ancestor. We’ll go on to the Dogwood Cemetery where my Grandmother’s family rests. Far from morbid, these tours of the countryside graveyards are joyful. They trigger memories and elicit more stories.

Indiana is the first country I loved. It holds my first family. It nurtured me. I’m going home for a visit. Happy Birthday, Aunt Mary.

Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

June 14, 2012

____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Our Retractable Umbilical Cords

Our Retractable Umbilical Cords

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________



Arlene, Leanna, Sharon and I sat around the table in Arlene’s kitchen in Watson , Saskatchewan , drinking tea and wine and comparing our lives. I grew up in eastern Montana , the others in eastern Saskatchewan . We are all women of the Prairies. We all left home vowing never to return. We each opted for a complete cultural change and each landed in a Big City . We made our lives, were happy, and now, here we are, back home again.



Sharon was the first one of us to respond to the subtle but definite pull back to our roots. Ten years ago, she and her husband Ron were on their way from Vancouver to Newfoundland to seek adventure on the opposite coast and to look over a restaurant which sounded promising. They stopped in Watson to visit Sharon ’s family. Sharon ’s mother Sophie was beginning to need extensive care. And the little café at the intersection of the two highways just happened to be for sale. Figuring one’s fortune was where one found it, within days Ron closed the deal on the café and began work to expand and rebuild. Over the years, on their rare days off from the restaurant, the couple began making Sophie’s house into their own home.



Because Sharon and I are close, you could say we are sisters of the chosen variety. Arlene asked, “How do you two know one another?” We laughed and our answers tumbled out. “We are buddies.” “Yes, we met in 1992 at a workshop on Mount Shasta where we were paired up.” “As buddies, we were responsible for one another, had to know where the other one was at all times.” “And since part of the experience was in the wilderness, this was important.” “We discovered we have common interests plus shared geography.” “And you oughta hear our coming of age stories.” “And we were the only two at Shasta who grew up in isolated country. It’s a bond of understanding.”



During the time I lived in Seattle and she in Vancouver , we continued our friendship, visiting three or four times a year. “Once Sharon moved back to the Prairies, our visits were infrequent. So the first person I called to announce my return to Montana was my buddy Sharon.” “Doesn’t surprise me,” she said. “I’ve been expecting this.” “Now we try to get together several times a year.”



Arlene, Sharon ’s cousin, returned to settle in Watson following several life changes, which included the deaths of her parents and a brother. Leanna is Sharon ’s hometown friend whose Mom had died only two months previously. That week she was stacking up piles and making keep-sell-toss decisions over her mother’s lifetime collections which filled every shelf, closet, wall, room, nook and cranny in the house. If Leanna finishes sorting, dispensing, and disposing in her own lifetime, we will all be surprised. The stuff could fill the Museum of Kitsch .



What brought us back? How did we each land in our parents’ houses? Never once did one of us say, “Gosh, I would love to live in my hometown in my parent’s home.” Sharon and I even paid good money for these houses which we did not want. Bit by bit, room by room, we have turned these old-fashioned but well-built houses into homes that fit us. Now Arlene and Leanna are beginning the process that Sharon and I have nearly completed: pitching, patching and painting. We all had sworn that we would never return. Yet, here we are, living fully and happily.



Each of us had a theory to explain what drew us back: family duties, a personal need to start over, a quest to rediscover familiar values, love for the land, insanity (?). As we sat around the table, we developed the answer to our questions. We are born with an invisible but retractable umbilical cord. It stretches to allow us every experience we choose. Then at a certain time, un-definable, it reaches its limit and begins retracting, pulling us hand over hand back to our beginnings.



Will we stay put forever? Are we stuck here? Who knows? The answer will be different for each of us. Maybe the umbilical cord will stretch again. But we’ll never go far away in spirit. The distance back will never be as long.



Sondra Ashton

HDN: Looking out my back door

October 21, 2010
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________