My Aunt Blanche died last month. Making arrangements and dealing with the inevitable things that need to be dealt with has kept me busy, but I'm just going to take the time now to reflect a little on her life and her part in mine.
Memories come flooding in – her taking us kids (my brother and our cousins) to Brookfield Zoo, she and her friend Dorothy taking me with them to hear concerts in Grant Park, she and my friend Marcy going with her to see the Ice Capades. There were her elaborately-decorated Easter eggs, fancily-wrapped Christmas presents, and intricate Christmas tree ornaments made with beads stuck with pins into Styrofoam balls. I also remember how much we both loved poppy seed kolačke, Bohemian bread dumplings, raised glazed donuts, and green olives.
I will never forget the New Year's Eve after everyone else had gone home when she and I crawled under the Christmas tree with a bottle of whiskey and sat there drinking the new year in.
One oddball thing suddenly came to me the other day that I had totally forgotten – we kids sometimes called her Auntie Branches. I don’t know who started that, but I think she kinda liked it.
She was my father's youngest sibling and what they used to call a bonus baby -- one who arrives long after the mother’s child-bearing years were thought to be over. The next youngest child was 11 years old when Blanche was born in 1927. Gently teased by her lady friends about this late pregnancy, my grandmother said, “This baby is going to take care of me in my old age.”
Blanche started taking care of her family, like her sister and brothers before her, by leaving school to get a job. She worked in a defense plant during the war, and after that spent the next 35 years working as a machine operator in a factory that made power tools.
She never married, and never expressed any regret about that, at least not in my hearing. She and Dorothy, her close friend and co-worker, took vacations together for over two decades, traveling all over North America by Greyhound bus. It was on those trips that she started collecting salt-and-pepper shakers as souvenirs. She had hundreds of them.
When she was in her mid-30’s, Blanche startled the entire family by taking driving lessons, got a license, and bought a car, a brand-new 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air. Thereafter she and Dorothy and some of their other friends could drive to vacation spots. And, one imagines, bring home lots more salt-and-pepper shakers.
Blanche fulfilled her mother’s prophesy, living with and caring for her mother until she died in 1972 at age 81.
A few years later, Blanche and my widowed father moved in together, and she took care of him until he died in 1978.
Her sister Mae, 18 years her senior, was living in Washington State in 1982 when her husband called Blanche to say he was dying of cancer and asked her to come take care of her sister after he was gone. Mae had had a stroke several years before.
Blanche quit her job, gave up her apartment, sold her furniture and her car, put the rest in storage, and headed out to Washington to take care of yet another relative. After Mae died in 1983, Blanche decided she liked it out there, especially the temperate climate so different from the hot summers and cold, snowy winters of Chicago. Her sister and brother-in-law left her everything, so she was pretty much set for the rest of her life.
I used to tell people my aunt lived in a tree in Washington. In truth, it was a double-wide trailer in the woods on the edge of the Olympic Mountains in an unincorporated wide place in the road called Joyce. For shopping, doctor, or other necessities she could drive the 15 miles to Port Angeles in the big 1980 Chevy van she inherited and drove until it died two years ago.
There were also magnificent sights to be seen within a few short miles of her home, with Olympic National Park to the south and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north, and Canada beyond.
Despite needing occasional home-nursing care, Meals on Wheels, and a little help from her friends and the EMTs who arrived when she pushed her help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up button, Blanche lived there alone until about a week before she died at age 90.
I think I will always smile when I remember her, for her kindness, her sense of fun and adventure, and, especially, for her endearing but hysterical hack of the English language. I posted a story about that in this here blog thing once (see “Mrs. Malaprop, I presume?” from October 16, 2010), so I won’t repeat myself here beyond including what is probably my favorite thing she ever said to me: even though it's narrow, the cars go down the street two at a breast.
After taking care of everybody else, in the end there was nobody to take care of Blanche Virginia Knez, formerly of Berwyn, lately of Joyce, so she took care of herself for 90 years, and did it quite well.
Rest in peace, Auntie Branches. I’ll miss you.
