I am nine years old, and summer is my favorite time of year.  We stay at our lake house in the mountains, me, my mother and father, and my older sister.  Our house is pretty big, so my aunts usually come and stay with us for part of that time.  There is a picture of my mother and her sisters that was taken around the last time they were together.  My mother is in the middle, and she is the middle sister, too.  My aunt Bonnie is the oldest and she is on the left, and on my mother’s right is the youngest sister, Vivian.  My Aunt Vivi was the most fun of the three, though my mother would sometimes play cards or jacks with me.  Usually mother and Aunt Bonnie were together, talking, smoking, and drinking coffee, and acting pretty serious.  I always thought my Aunt Bonnie was sad, but I didn’t know why, and it seemed as though my mother was always trying to cheer her up.  There was no room for other people in their little heads-together world.  My Aunt Vivian liked to go for long walks around the lake, or row out to the island to lie in the sun and cool off in the lake.  Best of all, she invited me to go with her, and I was always happy to, because my sister spent most of her time with the twins from across the lake.  When Aunt Vivi wasn’t there, I had to make my own fun, because my sister was a lofty teenager with no time for a kid.  The twins were exactly alike, with red hair and freckles and bikinis.  I’m pretty sure my sister smoked cigarettes when she was with them, and once I saw some boys bring my sister in a canoe to the shore by our house.  I was up in a tree and she didn’t know I saw her, and I never told anyone.  The best things she did for me during summer vacation were to French-braid my hair and let me look at her Seventeen magazines.   My aunts, Bonnie and Vivian, lived together and neither one ever married.  This was no surprise where Bonnie was concerned, but Vivian was fun and pretty, and you would wonder why she didn’t have a husband.  Bonnie was moody, and didn’t talk very much, and one time I heard my parents talking about how they were worried about her, but they shut up as soon as I came into the room.  Whenever I tried to talk to Aunt Bon, she just gave answers to my questions, and never asked me anything about myself.  I thought later that she must have not felt very well, because soon after she and Aunt Vivian left to go home that summer, we got the news that she had died.  My aunt!  At first I couldn’t believe it, that someone I loved, someone in my family, could die.  I was sad, and my mother was really sad, for the rest of the summer.  I was very sad for my mother and Aunt Vivi, and tried to put myself in their shoes by imagining my sister dying, but that was so upsetting I threw up and was put to bed the rest of the day.  I have been looking at that picture a lot, and in it, you can see that my mother and Aunt Vivian are in front, and close to each other, and look involved in the world, but Aunt Bonnie is in the back, looking puzzled, and kind of in the background, in the shadow of the others.

Written by Leslie Modena, Mangopunch’s Blog