Dispatches from the Midwest, Issue 4

Monday, 3 March 2014: Morning

It has finally finished snowing, and it looks very much like a late-winter wonderland outside. I spend rather a lot of time lingering by the windows, looking out at Aunt Jo’s birdfeeders, just enjoying the scarlet cardinals standing out so brilliantly against the snow. I’m not a very religious person these days, but I can’t help but to think that cardinals are what God gave to us to remind us of color during the winter.

When I’m not looking at the birdfeeders, I’m marveling at the fact that there are animal tracks in the snow. Real, honest-to-god wildlife! (I’m also becoming keenly aware that I’m a pathetic city-slicker.) Try as I might, I can’t figure out what one particularly intriguing set of tracks is. The  best I can come up with is some six-legged animal being chased by a creature of unknown origin...

Monday, 3 March 2014: Late afternoon and evening:

When Duncle’s mother (my grandmother) Lady Sue passed away, he inherited a huge trunk of various mementoes and memorabilia of hers—decades of correspondence, photos, and other odds and ends. He says that he and I had looked through it before, but I don’t remember. I was a younger person then, and took much—like mothers who were still alive, and the assumption that I would always be close by—for granted. So, as the winter dusk settles, Duncle and I pry open the trunk and spend several hours looking over letters and photos and newspapers and journals and even war ration books! Before she met my grandfather, she had a rather lively existence. It sounds like her dad ran off when she was young, and she eventually became a nightclub performer (she was an accomplished pianist)—in short, perhaps a bit of a gadabout.

I suppose Lady Sue was a bit notorious as an obsessive packrat, but as I peruse through her logs of nightclubs she performed at, places she traveled, people she met—I don’t think it’s at all ridiculous. I didn’t know her very well in life, but now that she’s gone, and so much of our family history with her, I’ll take these little scraps of her life where I can get them.