Tuesday, October 28, 2008

My Aunt Bernice

Every little girl should have an Aunt Bernice.

Phil and I stopped to visit my Aunt Bernice on her farm in north Florida on our way to the beach this past week-end. As we drove down the country road toward the farm, I remembered that it was once a dirt road, now paved, and we used to cross three small bridges, not there anymore, before we reached the new farmhouse that Uncle John had built for his family. Uncle John is no longer with us, but Aunt Bernice still calls the little house her home. It is no longer a new house, either. Aunt Bernice is now in her 80s, and it has been her house for 50 some-odd years.

Phil and I recognized the farm, not by the house, because you could hardly see it behind the huge magnolia trees that hid it from view from the road. We saw the familiar shed as we approached where Uncle John used to store lumber, feed, tools, machinery, anything that needed a roof over its head. As we turned up the driveway, the little gray house didn’t look new as it always does in my mind, or as big. But despite its age, it still invited me to visit, and the screen door still creaked when I opened it to knock on the front door. I could hardly wait to see Aunt Bernice, wrap up in her hugging arms, and have a couple of homemade biscuits I knew she was keeping warm for us in her oven.

As a child, I loved my Aunt Bernice beyond measure. I still do, and I treasure her more now thinking of all of her many acts of kindess toward me when I was a little girl. I remember getting on a Greyhound Bus in Atlanta as a little girl and riding all by myself to Jasper, where she and Uncle John would pick me up at the gas station that served as the bus terminal for the small town and place me between them in their pick-up truck for the ride to the farm. I loved my visits to the farm. It was there that Aunt Bernice taught me how to make butter from cream and to make buttermilk biscuits with milk from their cows, how to feed a baby calf from a bucket with a nipple attached to it, how to thread tobacco leaves onto the long stick for drying in the tobacco barn, and then how to unthread them when they were dry and stack them for taking to the tobacco market. I also learned how to wash clothes in a wringer washer, collect eggs without breaking them, and how to call pigs. I also learned how to amuse myself on hot summer afternoons when it was too hot to work in the garden by swatting flies on the front porch, playing pick-up-sticks, and reading books from the bookshelf in their livingroom.

Uncle John was my mother’s younger brother, and he and Aunt Bernice lived on a wonderful farm in Jasper, Florida. Uncle John also had a mail route, but I never thought of him as a letter carrier – he was always a farmer to me. Aunt Bernice worked with him on the farm, and my cousins Paul and Barbara, worked, too. On my summer trips to the farm, I was assigned jobs, but I didn’t work nearly as hard as they all did. I was their little cousin from the city, and they knew that I didn’t have a clue about what living on a farm was really like. Aunt Bernice always came to my rescue when they teased me, and found something that I could do very well to praise me for. One summer I was the champion fly swatter, another summer, I was the best calf baby-sitter that she knew. She even helped soothe the sunburn I got from sitting in the pasture all afternoon one day with a baby calf asleep on my lap.

Aunt Bernice has a wonderful sense of humor and a comedic timing that is second to none. I think this probably served her well during periods of hard times on the farm. I love visiting her, because I know that she will make me laugh, will bring the funny out in me, and we’ll laugh and cut-up and have a wonderful time together.

While I can’t relate all of the wonderful memories I have of my Aunt Bernice (and my Uncle John, too), in this short blog space, they live in my memory and are there to pull out whenever I think about her. She has always been a wonderful role model for me - a strong woman, both physically and spiritually, and as beautiful a person as I’ve ever known.

The world would be a much better place if every little girl could have her own Aunt Bernice.

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