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Aunt Marie Soper
By Judy Keifer, Litchfield
I wrote a column several years ago about how I had a cousin in California whom I had never met, but we had corresponded for years. Finally, she and her daughter came east for a visit, and we had a great old time reminiscing about our mutual relatives. Her father was my mother's brother.
I remembered that she and her daughter had driven to Ohio, and they took Aunt Marie back to California to live with them when she became too elderly to live alone. "So, after Aunt Marie died, was she buried with her husband, in Indiana?" I asked.
"No," my cousin said, "it would have cost several thousand dollars to have her shipped back there, with the casket and burial, so we had her cremated, and she is on a shelf over our dryer!" For some reason, I'm sorry, but that sent us off into gales of laughter.
Okay, fast forward to this year. A couple of months ago I got a phone call from my cousin, announcing that they were moving to Connecticut, and that she had already sold their house! It occurred to me that they were moving from one of the highest-cost-of-living places on the west coast … to one of the highest on the east coast. But I didn't want to burst their bubble, so I said that was great. "Oh, by the way," she said, "should I bring Aunt Marie? She is still on the shelf above the dryer!"
"Of course!" I said. "Don't leave her there; she will freak out the people who bought your house! I will find a place for her." So they drove cross-country and settled in Wallingford, and I invited them to our house. They came bearing a plastic bag, with a heavy, sealed brass box in it. Aunt Marie was here! In the commotion of their arrival, I grabbed the bag and put it in the basement. The next morning, when I went down to put in a wash, there was the box.
This isn't right, I thought. The poor woman was on a shelf over a dryer for years and now she is in my basement, on the floor next to my dryer! I had to think of something better.
I looked out the door to our backyard. There is a white arbor that my husband got me for that landmark 65th birthday, and my little frog pond, all sheltered by an old red maple. So I got out my post-hole digger and worked my way through the New England clay to a proper depth, and set the brass box in and covered it with potting soil for a pink chrysanthemum. Pink is my favorite color … I hope Aunt Marie liked it, too.
And, if spirits communicate, she will find she has many Soper kinfolk in this area.
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