Up Closer, With Issues

These lovely yellows are barren strawberry, one of my favorite ground covers. Barren because they bear no fruit, not even tiny berries, just lovely blossoms for a few weeks each Spring. They remind me of spinsters.

My father was for a memorable time in his youth raised in Glendale, WVA, by three spinster sisters, his Aunts Carolyn, who was called Taddy, Elizabeth, who was called Dibby, and Helen-Louise.

Dibby, the oldest, wanted to become a nun but found her calling as an army nurse. Inducted into the American Legion in Baltimore MD, she stood alone, the only woman among 800 men. She was scheduled to ship overseas in 1918 but Spanish influenza required she stay here to nurse the dying. She retired to care for their mother, Carrie, who had taken to her bed in depression and refused to get up for years. Carrie rang a bell for Dibby when she needed something, and she would come.

Taddy was profoundly deaf, completely insane, and read compulsively: every book in the library, six at a time, as she rocked in her rocking chair. She was brilliant and could finish the daily NY Times crossword in minutes. She was also convinced she was the Empress of Austria, which is impressive for a daughter of Scot-Irish and English parents.

Helen Louise was born with a cleft palate and a severe speech impediment, and too would never marry, but was fiercely loved and protected by her sisters. I try to fathom the life Dibby led, the independent life that became a ringing bell, the crazy and disabled sisters, the empty bed at night when she would lay down exhausted. Maybe after what she saw of WWI on the home front, this was easy, but I would love to know how she felt in her heart. I wonder if my father was more joy than additional burden when he came as a young boy to stay with them. I know she loved my father dearly, as did her sisters; I'm sure they adored him, as he was like the son they would never have, for a time. I imagine when he left two years later to return to Princess Anne, MD to live with his reunited parents, they must have missed him terribly. I know he missed them and the stability and unwavering love they gave him.

Here is the only picture I have of my Great Aunt Dibby. I love that she is holding flowers, slightly smiling.



My Dad returned to Glendale, to the three aunts, three years later when he was just fourteen, when Dibby got sick. He returned the love and care given him, helping to nurse Carolyn and then Dibby as she succumbed to emphysema and pneumonia, attending school when he could or when he chose to go. The two sisters died within 6 months of each other in 1950. My father helped move the surviving Aunt Helen Louise, back to Princess Anne, where she lived until 1986. She was the only one of my great aunts I was ever to know, and I regret being scared by her wild eyes and incomprehensible speech, for failing to know what I could of her life.

In a family tree tracing my father's side for a legal dispute over an inheritance, my great aunts are listed as died without issue. Died w/o issue seems an odd phrase. Isn't it interesting that children are cited as issues? I am the middle child, the only to reproduce, and for the first thirty years of my life I was certain I too would die without issue, first by choice, then by chance, but I got lucky. My sister and brother have never wanted children and will purposefully die without issue. My sister and I have had several good laughs about that concept, because with or without children, we both have some serious issues, and think the pun is hilarious.

I find the ever shrinking size of our family to be striking. My father's father was one of six children surviving infancy, nine siblings total. Of the six, four died childless, the remaining two had only two children each. Of my father's three children, only I have issues, 2 fascinating, extraordinary issues. The line may be shrinking, but it lives on, like these barren beauties in my back yard. I tell my babies these stories about the people who lived before them, and cared for those who cared for me, as I care for them. I tell them I hope they keep the DNA alive, because they come from very interesting and complex people, and I hope they find someone to love and care for and have issues of their own someday. If they don't have issues, I wish them at the very least some lovely gardens of their own to tend.