(for Margaret Patience Shepherd Speirs MacLeod May 27, 1919 - September 9, 2018)
My Aunt Pat, my father's little sister, would have turned 100 this week. After her passage last September into the great mystery that we call death, there were no family members left of my parents' generation. She took with her her memories of a world war and its aftermath and all of the secrets and lessons of a 99-year life. Following my Uncle Syd's death in 2000, Aunt Pat had lived alone in her semi-detached house outside of Glasgow until just over a year ago, when my cousin Judy (her only child) felt she had no choice but to move her into a care facility.
I felt surprisingly emotional when Judy emailed me from her home in Scotland to tell me that her mother had died, and I have been pondering that emotion ever since. Certainly, the death was not unexpected -- Aunt Pat had been failing for a while, and it's not as though I had spent a great deal of time with her. She, like my other Scottish relatives, lived thousands of miles from me, my family's immigration (while I was in utero) from Glasgow to Quebec Provence, and a couple of years later to New Jersey, having left me bereft of close relatives as I grew up, and my further move to the Pacific Northwest as an adult, having widened the distance..
Still, Aunt Pat was important to me. In my childhood, she was one of the shadowy relatives with whom my mother exchanged air letters, those bits of light-blue, tissue-thin folded paper through which people kept in touch with geographically distant family before the advent of email, texts, Skype, and relatively inexpensive phone calls. (There were never phone calls to Scotland when I was a child, not even when my maternal grandparents died one year apart - it would have been unthinkable to my parents or their far-off kin to spend that kind of money. The news of these deaths came via telegram.) The steady flow of mail, together with my mother's stories, kept me aware of my distant family. (Most effective in this regard were the occasional cards with a pound note or two enclosed--very exotic.)
It wasn't until 1971 that I met Aunt Pat in person. In the summer of that year, I traveled to Scotland and spent the better part of three months with Aunt Pat, Uncle Syd, and Judy at their home outside of Glasgow. It did not take long for me to recognize my aunt as not only kin, but kindred. I confess that I often felt alienated from my father during my growing-up years, yet I felt a near-immediate connection to his sister. I recognized myself in her; I could relax in her company.
I was fortunate enough to spend more time in Aunt Pat's company during her infrequent visits to the U.S. in the years that followed and on a couple of visits to Scotland during the past ten years. I think she was about 94 the last time I saw her in person (there were a few Skype visits after that), and she remained delightful throughout all of those years.
Aunt Pat was a gardener; I wasn't one in 1971 when I noted the pleasure she took in toiling among her vegetables and flowers, but it wasn't long after that I started rooting around in the dirt, and I have not stopped in the decades since. I am thinking about her today as I prepare to leave my home to visit relatives in the midwest, and to tear myself away from my garden, which is springing into full bloom even as I prepare to get on an airplane.
Here is something I wrote back in the '90s about that long-ago trip to Scotland:
"I am sure I admired my aunt's garden, but I could not understand her devotion. I remember clearly my puzzlement over her statement that she hated to travel in the summer because it was so hard to leave her garden.
"How could a small patch of growing things possibly compare with the adventure of traveling? The idea didn't bear further contemplation.
"Now, 20 years later, I understand. I understand how a patch of green and living things can capture the imagination and soothe the soul. I understand how--after patiently waiting out the winter--one could be reluctant to leave a garden at the moment when it is at once most in need of attention and most worthy of admiration."*
And now, a couple of decades on, as travel seems less of an adventure and more of a wrench, I continue to share Aunt Pat's desire to stay close to home during gardening season. By the time I return from my trip, many of the spring blossoms will have fallen and weeds will be running riot. I hope the neighbors enjoy looking at my flowers while I'm gone and kindly overlook the weeds.
And I hope I will, like my aunt, be fit enough to garden well into old age.
May it be so.
*Back in the '90s I wrote a weekly garden column for The Columbian (Vancouver, Washington's daily paper). I didn't ask permission to quote these few paragraphs, so mum's the word.
With Aunt Pat in 2013
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