Yesterday...

Was my great aunt’s birthday. She would have been 95.

I miss her tremendously, as you can imagine. She’s the only person who encouraged me my entire life, the only one who I was able to count on, no matter what. The only person to always be proud of me, whether I was four and learning to print her name or forty-four and sending off a book I had written.

I worked up the nerve to start going through some of the things I brought home from her house. I figured I was even more swamped with memories last weekend than usual so it was as good a time as any. I started with the box containing photo albums. Yeah, it was very hard. Bittersweet. But that one should be the most difficult. The others will be easier. They’re just stuff, not faces.

I found the scrapbook her class had made for her when she retired back in 1974. That was fun. I don’t know who they enlisted to snag pictures from her life outside of school but there were a bunch that made me smile. A million years ago, she used to sing professionally and there was a program for an event where she was the featured soloist. There were also pictures of her cat, Puffball, who hated everyone but Irva. She would corner me, not letting me out of the room, whenever she could. I can’t tell you how many times I had to call for help because of that cat.

There was an album of old relatives. Her grandparents, parents, uncles and the cousins. I had a lot of fun looking through that one. I knew the cousins when they were all over 50 so it was great seeing them with Irva when they were all much, much younger. And there was an album of me, birth to maybe age seven. Apparently I used to have a thing for hats. There’s one picture of me looking outside with longing. You can see the rain on the window. Some things never change.