Dear readers,
A long stretch of travel with intermittent or nonexistent Internet last fall, followed by technical glitches just now getting resolved, have prevented me from posting for far too long! If you’re a new follower, please read my first four blogs to catch the ongoing vision for this website and blog. If you started out with me a year ago, thanks for your patience!
And now, in the spirit of passing on the faith to the next generation, a memory….
Praise, Amid Tears
“Christy, Aunt Polly got in late last night from the airport. I need to go up to your uncle’s to see her. Will you watch Holly for an hour or so?”
“Sure,” I agreed, secretly disappointed – yet at the same time relieved – that Mama wasn’t inviting me to go with her. I was 14 that year, officially old enough to babysit my eight-year-old sister and a couple of young cousins who lived nearby in Houghton, NY, where we’d moved a year earlier when my dad started teaching at private, church-affiliated Houghton College. Still — couldn’t my older brother stay with Holly?
“Thanks, Honey.” Mama, usually adept at picking up on my emotions, missed the questioning look on my face. Her normally serene, smiling face crinkled once again into the anxious worry lines I’d seen off and on in the 72 hours since we’d heard about the death of her oldest sister’s husband. “I’m not sure what to say to her.” She sighed, but her face brightened a little. “Lord, You’ll just have to help me!”
Mama opened the kitchen door and began to walk across the flat, Genesee River stones that made a path through the back lawn to our driveway. Her colorful, full-skirted shirtdress swished around her long legs as she headed past the neighbors’ tall hedge and up the road to her big brother’s home, where Aunt Polly would stay – for now.
My mind went back ten months to the time when the stone path had been the scene of busier, happier comings and goings as Mama had joyfully prepared to host Aunt Polly’s wedding reception. How could we have just celebrated a wedding….and now this?
My newly teen-aged heart had been astounded the previous year to learn that my cheerful, hardworking 61-year-old spinster aunt was engaged. Engaged? Aunt Polly had always been part and parcel of my growing-up years in Syracuse, NY, where she and Grandma lived in a tiny white Cape Cod-style house located in a sedate neighborhood. That little house, surrounded by the perennial flower gardens Aunt Polly had wrested out of hardened dirt and mounds of rock, was regularly the scene of birthday and Christmas parties for the 18 grandchildren produced by Aunt Polly’s seven siblings.
Those parties were legendary. Grandma’s kitchen always smelled like homemade pies, cinnamon rolls and molasses cookies, but birthdays meant delicate, simply decorated cakes, fine china, and candles. Aunt Polly and our moms were in charge of entertainment, though, and those parties were magic. My favorite was the fish pond – a mysterious “pool” behind carefully draped blankets in the living room into which we threw a fishing line. Our “catch” included tiny wrapped packages of gum, candy, jump ropes, cars, or dolls, always, and curiously, exactly appropriate for the age and gender of the fisherman.
And music – always there was music. Grandma, one of five pampered daughters in a wealthy, refined Canadian family, was supposed to be a concert pianist, but instead she’d fallen in love with a penniless young preacher. Aunt Polly, like all three of her brothers and all four of her sisters, inherited her musical gifts, so singing hymns and silly songs around the upright Bell piano Grandpa had managed to purchase from England as a wedding gift for his bride was a “given” at every family gathering.
What would happen to our parties after Aunt Polly got married? Who would take care of Grandma? Those questions rocked my world – but my budding fascination with romance superseded my childish angst. Did old people like Aunt Polly fall in love? How did that work? Would she wear a white dress? Have a honeymoon? Have…sex?
I finally voiced those questions to Mama, who must have decided I was old enough to hear one of the few family stories she’d never shared. I was stunned to learn that Aunt Polly had had a wedding, a white dress and a honeymoon many years ago. She’d been 19 – tall, with soft, dark hair, shy and serious-looking – and, as the oldest child of a still-poor but now highly esteemed pastor, a prestigious “prize” for the dashing son of well-to-do family acquaintances. He had swept her off her feet and whisked her away from her east-coast upbringing to his home out west – a home he shared with his widowed mother. Only then did my aunt discover that he could never give her a real marriage or children, and only wanted her as a beautifully dressed ornament to bolster his reputation on Sunday mornings. During the week she was a virtual servant, her communication with her family limited.
Grandpa and Grandma had hesitated over the marriage, so they were horrified, but not completely surprised, when the truth began to trickle out. A minor automobile accident in which Grandma was involved provided a small insurance windfall, and Grandpa wired his daughter the money to buy a train ticket east. The marriage was annulled, and Aunt Polly came home, sadder, wiser, chagrined, to the cushioning love and fortress of her family.
The years passed, with Aunt Polly living at home, working at a local publisher’s, and after that, in an upscale department store. Her sufferings had matured her, her heritage strengthened her, and her God-given talents and positive attitude brightened the lives of all she touched. Grandpa died in 1946, and Aunt Polly uncomplainingly assumed the position of companion and caregiver to her mother for the next 18 years.
Then in 1963 one of my uncles approached Aunt Polly with a startling proposal. His wife’s brother, a pastor in a small denomination down south, was newly bereaved. His children were grown and gone; living alone in the parsonage was placing him in a vulnerable situation. Would Polly be interested in meeting with this man to discuss marriage?
An arranged marriage in America, in the 1960s? But by God’s grace it worked. Awkwardness and stilted conversation turned to delight, and genuine love. Aunt Polly fairly glowed as the prospects of a new home, a new purpose, a kind and distinguished life companion, and wide-open vistas came in view. The wedding, performed by her brother, and the reception, held in our light-filled, flower-decorated home, were sweet, and gentle, and full of laughter.
And now – it was over. All that joy, all that hope, all that blessing of others in the name of Jesus – over. How would Aunt Polly respond?
A while later, Mama returned home, a kind of awed light on her face.
“Aunt Polly was amazing, just amazing,” she told me. “We hadn’t been together for 20 minutes before she had me laughing about a funny thing that happened on their honeymoon. And then we were giggling about her new husband trying to teach her – unsuccessfully — how to drive. But suddenly she stopped talking, and she said, ‘I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me. I had more love and joy in nine months of marriage than most women have in a lifetime. God has been so good to me!’”
Aunt Polly’s joyful attitude of praise and thanksgiving – and her trust in a Savior who cared deeply about a woman’s heart – continued as her signature characteristic for the remainder of her life. Now widowed, she took a humble job in the Houghton College kitchen, lovingly mothering and mentoring the college students working around her. Once again she cultivated a perennial garden outside a new-to-her tiny, old-fashioned cottage.
And now, once again, Aunt Polly was part and parcel of my growing-up, this time into adult Christian faith. As a moody teen, I didn’t always appreciate her cheerful, upbeat demeanor and frequent exclamations of praise for God’s goodness. But as the years went on, and her strong, open-hearted faith persisted into her old age, I realized that the role model she lived was authentic, believable, and one to be emulated.
I learned the hard way, of course, that praising God in the midst of tears, as Aunt Polly appeared to do so freely, only comes with disciplined, repetitive, dogged practice. My woman heart and experiences have expanded to include higher education, marriage, the birth of three children and the death of a fourth, saying “goodbye for now” to two of my three siblings in their forties, misogyny in the workplace and injustice in the Body of Christ, caring for aging and dying parents, and adjusting to life’s ever-changing stages. In each situation I’ve come to appreciate, ever more deeply, the “sacrifice of praise” Aunt Polly offered faithfully and frequently. (See Jeremiah 17:26; 33:11; Hebrews 13:15.)
And what she passed on to me, I’ve tried to pass on to my children, who are now passing it on to theirs.
Praise, amid tears.
