She was alone yet somehow she did not consider herself lonely. Aunt Edie Semog was one of the few women I ever looked up to. She was tough yet sensitive, stubborn yet forgiving, artistic in her views and she always lost her patience in an educated and eloquent manner. Looking at photographs passed around within our family during holiday dinners, I was always excited to see how Aunt Edie remained just as beautiful as she once was during her high school prom. She always kept her hair long past her shoulders, always colored as a deep chocolate, and she stood at 5’6” on her gorgeously lean legs and slim frame. Her eyes were as black as the night and she always had a curious stare. I have always been intrigued as to how someone so interesting and wonderful to look at, never married nor to the least fallen in love.
Aunt Edie never seemed bothered by the rude remarks her sisters would make during those family dinners. She always sat beside me with a quiet smile and nodded and sometimes even giggled at comments such as “My husband and I are celebrating our 7th anniversary next month, I can’t see myself any happier unless being married to him”. Ave Semog [1] always had the crudest of all comments to share, she had one famous line (“Just get a man, it’s about time don’t ya think”) that she would always say no matter who was at the table. This of course would always cause an uncomfortable commotion in which Edie would stop smiling and excuse herself for the rest of the evening.
I only speculate as to why the prettiest of the sisters died single at age 72, and thus I choose to blame her parents, my grandparents that is. Edie was the youngest of the 3 sisters, born in June 14th, 1937. Her parents marriage was her father’s third and on her 8th birthday she said goodbye to the man she thought was her hero. The family’s biggest secret is why grandma and grandpa divorced but I know for a fact it’s the reason for Edie’s solitude. She would always tell me to open the pink wooden box under her bed once she died, but I would always pretend not to hear her speak of her own death, yet now 2 weeks after a sad afternoon I find myself in her room holding the peculiar box. It contained:
4 journals
2 photographs
1 pencil
I slowly opened each journal only to find a different side of my beloved Aunt poured within each page. Behind her quiet smile was a sea of confusion. She too was not aware of what kept her from loving; page after page of the same question and no answer. The two photographs were of her father, one dated before the divorce and the other dated long after. At one point she makes a reference to Robert Gail’s book The Purple Swing. I remember her making several attempts to discuss its meaning during one Christmas dinner, yet it was in vain as her sisters resumed mocking her with their own marriages.
Nevertheless her 3rd journal mentions the story of a girl, who dreamt of having a purple swing in her backyard and spent her whole summer planning its layout and means to purchase the swing, yet summer comes to an end and she realizes she ran out of time therefore the swing would serve no purpose. There was my answer and hers as well. Edie spent her life trying to figure out what went wrong with her parents only ruining her own chances of being happy with a loved one.
1. Ave Semog was the eldest of the sisters, 13 years older than Edie. She married five times resulting in a total of 8 children from all marriages combined. Her eldest daughter died single at age 35.
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The piece captures readers’ attention from the beginning with an intriguing entry point, “She was alone yet somehow she did not consider herself lonely.” This paradox is followed by a series of others, “tough yet sensitive, stubborn yet forgiving, artistic in her views and she always lost her patience in an educated and eloquent manner.” Readers are immediately intrigued by the person being presented to them and want to learn more, particularly when they learn that this beautiful and charming woman never wed.
ReplyDeleteThe account borrows from the mystery genre when the narrator reads her late aunt’s journal, kept in a pink wooden box. This element gives the piece an air of fiction. While biographical in nature, the essay does not read as a typical biography (i.e. it is void of elements such as birth date, accomplishments, death date which we might typically expect to see). The personal narrator also adds to the sense that the piece may be a work of fiction, even though the account does seem realistic.
The assignment’s suggestions to use footnotes and list form operate in this piece in different ways. The footnote does not seem particularly useful to the work accomplished by this essay because it is an isolated element in the piece which does not feel like a necessary digression and could just as easily be incorporated into the piece if desired. Often footnotes deliver unnecessary digressions to add a certain stylistic element to the work, but here there is only one footnote and the tone is otherwise serious and the information deliberate. The list form operates quite effectively, however, serving as a catalogue of the aunt’s treasured possessions as well as providing context for the insight the narrator will gain about her aunt. We all leave behind things when we die, and cataloguing it in list form has a certain blunt, unsentimental quality about it that I personally enjoyed.