Ethel

Ethel
By
Debbie Lindsey

Aunt Ethel always took great pride in any ailment she might encounter. There are those who might use the term hypochondria, but the way I see it, she simply felt special about any physical shortcoming she might have had. Take for example an allergy: she could turn this mundane annoyance into a real conversation piece. So, it was quite ironic that a woman with a medicine cabinet to rival Walgreens would outlive all her siblings and contemporaries. Somewhere in Ethel seemed to be the fountain of youth – and her damn allergies had best take a backseat.
You’d think it was my life the way I took to bragging on her age – her longevity became infectious and made me feel invincible. As long as she lived I could look with defiance at my mortality. It wasn’t just the amount of years under her belt; it was the way she lived them. At ninety she looked closer to seventy-five (at seventy-five she still indulged her hobby of boating and rigorous fishing) with an agility I could never match; she credited this to her touching her toes, knees straight, 100 times each day.
At an age when most folks sell their homes to move into assisted living arrangements, Ethel thought it was high time to buy her first home. She was ninety-three. She did however relinquish her drivers license at ninety-five – she thought it the mature thing to do.
During these years as my life affirming, less complaining aunt was defying both the medical and real estate status quo, I was living, as now, in New Orleans. My visits with her were scarce. On the map it looks so easy but “as the crow flies” does not apply to Mobile’s relationship to the Eastern Shore town of Fairhope. Trips home to Mobile were by way of the Greyhound and being a non-driving individual those thirty-miles across the bay to Fairhope would require the feet of Jesus to get there. So, for close to six years I lost touch considerably with my favorite aunt and favorite side of Mobile Bay.
It is impossible for me to think of Ethel without thought to the bay, my bay. This estuary is habitat to pelicans, gulls, dolphins, crabs and beaucoup fish, with mullets winning my heart as they dance across the surface. Those looking for a salty blue surf and white beaches need to travel another sixty miles. I like my water the color of cloudy ice tea trimmed with small patches of sand stained by it’s tides and decorated with cypress knees and skeleton legs of wharves fallen prey to summer storms.
The Eastern Shore, “across the bay” as locals refer, is a stretch of land with one small town after another that hugs this bay. This fertile green and rolling shoreline is thick with oak, pecan, and pine trees all sporting their tattered gray laundry of Spanish moss that the brightest of summer suns can never bleach. Each of these bay towns has been home one time or another to Dad’s family and even Dad relocated to this shore when he passed.
Two years before Ethel’s ninety-fifth birthday party I scattered my Dad’s ashes onto Mobile Bay (my mom would soon follow but by way of higher ground). This burial at sea, if you can call a depth of five feet of water at the foot of the Grand Hotel’s pier a sea, would be the last time my folks would bring me to the bay. After they died I did not see Ethel or the bay again for another two years. Phone calls and letters with Ethel were all I had to keep my memories on life support – until the party.
The cousins were the ones who invited me back to my roots – roots that never really took hold in Mobile but grew like weeds in the sand and red clay across the bay. The family had planned a reunion for Ethel’s ninety-fifth birthday. And it would be Ethel who would give a gift to me.
My aunt gave me many things through the years: Toll House cookies, a check in every birthday card, endless hand-me-down treasures and at ninety-five she brought my father back to life and with him, my mom and an entire bay.
In getting to this party, my friend, Marinnette became the executor of my inheritance of memories and Delta waters. Marinnette was always game for a little road trip and having recently lost her mom, she was keen to see me visit my aunt and my parent’s past. It was that excursion on the occasion of Ethel’s birthday that my friend and I discovered what would be a second home of sorts to both of us – Oak Haven: a collection of small cottages scattered among oaks and snowy blossom-topped dogwoods across the road from the bay. For the past ten years Oak Haven has placed me within reach of Ethel, family history and the changing tides.
I did not get to hug my aunt, share a cookie or listen to stories about her younger brother on my last visit. At one hundred and four Aunt Ethel simply wore out. I guess I came to expect her to live forever and well…she just might. You see, next time I sit on the pier and look out onto the bay I expect to see Ethel fishing with her husband once again and maybe, they will have invited my father to join them.