Aunt Peg and Mama

I looked out the kitchen window, my eyes blurred by sudden tears. The two sisters, white haired, one ninety and the other eighty three, were walking in the yard looking at flowers, arms linked for support and comfort. Aunt Peg (Awhnt not Ant) for whom I am named, is visiting her baby sister, my mama. Grandma heard Aunt Peg praying for a baby sister and her prayers were answered with a sister on her birthday, September 18, when she was seven years old. They have lived their lives separated by geographical distance but connected by a fierce sister love. Every night they talk on the phone, worrying when one doesn’t answer.
They are my only living link to a large family that is memory now. Aunt Dada and Uncle Booshie (who died as an alcoholic), Aunt Nina and Uncle Jack (who died from tuberculosis), Aunt Polly (the prize winning lady golfer) and Uncle Les, Uncle Carl and Aunt Vera (she was the married woman who divorced her husband and pursued my Uncle Carl, a SCANDAL!), Grandma and Granddaddy... all dead and gone with my grandma the only one who had children of her own. Of her three children, the two sisters remain. Birthdays, state fairs, holidays... all were grand occasions for the family to gather at “2204", the Fritzche family home in Richmond. My great-grandfather, Max Fritzche, and his brother established the first ether factory in America and sold it when my great-great uncle decided to return to Germany. Money from that adventure, I suspect, built the grand old home I remember. It had a library full of leather bound books that Aunt Dada had to sell for income after her father and husband died. Large rooms filled with Victorian furniture, grand porches with expansive yards, a kitchen that was always warm and welcoming, a family home for my great aunts, my grandma, my mama and her sister.
After graduation from high school, my very German grandmother gave my mama one week at home before she was packed off to Richmond to live at 2204 with the aunts and her sister to go to business school. Her sister paid her tuition for school because her parents were cash strapped farmers during the war years. They rode the streetcar to work together, shared a room and could put both of their wardrobes into one four drawer chest. They double dated brothers, flirted and played, worked and lived together until mama married her Georgia sailor boy. Their lives moved in different paths and now, widowed and old in years, they have this week together, sisters who love each other.
I sit watching them, seeing them with eyes of love, seeing pictures of them as young women hanging on the wall, remembering them through the years of my life, and give thanks for the loving ties that bind them, and me, together. One no longer young woman, two old women and all the women who have gone before us... bound by a shared heritage and lives lived as well as possible through hard times and good times.
I am reminded of some of the women in the Bible who lived perfectly ordinary lives, like Ruth and Naomi. Their lives, like Aunt Peg and Mama’s, hold for me the image of the Greatest Commandment, loving God while loving others. Most of us will never be great leaders, or perfect mothers or wives. Few of us will have the opportunity to change the course of world history but all of us can learn to love.
One of the old time churches my parents belonged to used the titles of “Sister” and “Brother” in front of your name. Everyone, even the preacher, had this honorific attached to the first or last name depending upon the degree of friendship... Sister Thelma or Sister Minter, Brother Howard or Brother Coody. You knew you were grown up, no longer a child, when this title was added to your name. In a world full of sisters and brothers, we can love one another as Aunt Peg and Mama do, clear eyed and by choice not just an accident of birth. So bless you this day, my sisters and brothers. I am loving you from afar and someday, near. I pray for you, your struggles, illnesses, pains and sufferings. I give thanks for your joys, your gifts, your connection to me, your sister in Christ, and look forward to a day of glad reunion at the family home place.