Esther is my grandmother’s double first cousin. (My great-grandfather’s brother married my great-grandmother’s sister.) Esther was born twenty years after my grandmother, which explains why she’s still alive and kicking and still way under a hundred years old. Esther is one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which we don’t talk about. We also don’t talk about my being gay, even if my husband goes with me to her house. I know what she is, and she knows what I am, and we don’t entirely approve of each other, but we’re family. (And as far as the family is concerned, she’s almost as much a deviate as I am, because of her religion.) I love her, and I think she likes me. Esther is a passionate and intelligent woman, and she tells great stories, and she makes the only tomato soup I’ve ever really liked. I think I know how to make it, but I need to make sure, and I need to hear some stories. Esther tells stories about people who died a hundred years ago and more, stories she heard from her mother (my great-grandmother’s sister). She doesn’t sugarcoat, and she doesn’t hold back. She tells the truth as best she can.
Esther has a biracial great-grandson. When Esther showed me the picture of the little black boy and told me he was her great-grandson, I couldn’t help asking her how she felt about that.
“What do you know about the McGuires?” she asked. (McGuire is her maiden name, and my grandmother’s.)
“Well, I know them pretty well,” I said.
“Well then, you know how I felt!” she said, and her voice rose in passion. “I thought I was gonna die!”
Then, softer: “But once I held that baby, I knew he was mine.”
See, your grandma’s cousin can be a Witness of Jehovah, and you can be gay as a goose, but you have to love somebody like that. You can still meet somewhere; you still connect. Don’t you?
Esther collects arrowheads she finds on her land, and she gardens and puts up preserves, and she remembers everything, and she makes me feel connected. I want to sit at her counter and eat tomato soup and cornbread, and feel like somebody’s grandson, or at least somebody’s cousin’s grandson.
Esther has told me a lot of stories, but one of my favorites is about when her mother was dying.
Aunt Martha was a big, hearty woman. She loved to cook and she loved to see people eat her cooking, and she loved to laugh. They say she was very different from her sister Laura, my great-grandmother, who was very serious and pious and who died very young.
Anyway, Aunt Martha was dying of cancer. They didn’t talk about it, but Esther and Aunt Martha both knew Aunt Martha was dying, and they both knew the other one knew. Aunt Martha was lying on Esther’s bed, and Esther was giving her a pedicure, and Aunt Martha told her, “Esther, always remember: no matter who you lose, life can always be sweet again.”
Aunt Martha wasn’t just somebody who could throw together a Sunday dinner for sixty or eighty people every single Sunday of her life; she was somebody who knew a thing or two.
I could use a dose of that about now.
awesome story. thank you.