Happy Birthday, Aunt Hi

95 years ago today my Aunt Helen was born. I wrote about her earlier this month and somewhere alluded to the only time I ever saw her angry, or at least angry with me.

Here’s that story.

Aunt Helen and Uncle Bob lived in a two-story house in Tripoli. I loved her house. I loved the huge old Willow tree in the front yard and the laundry shoot into the basement. I loved the stream running past the east edge of her property and how it sometimes overflowed in the spring and flooded her yard. I loved the closet under the stairs where she kept her vacuum cleaner and a stash of toys.  

My sister and I spent the night at Aunt Helen’s once in a while, and we slept in our cousin Gail’s old bedroom. Because it was upstairs, the ceiling sloped to within three feet of the floor. The bed was up against the wall which meant the pitched ceiling was just above our heads.

It was summertime, and like all kids of the time, we spent most of our days outside with bare feet. I was maybe seven or eight at the time, so it didn’t occur to me that feet actually got dirty with this activity. Lying in that bed that night I got the crazy notion to walk my feet across that ceiling. And they left little foot prints behind, which Aunt Helen did not think were as cute as I did. That’s how my foot prints got on her ceiling.

For Christmas 1982, my parents sent me to Alaska with Aunt Helen to visit her son and his wife. Don was (and still is) quite the hunter. Here we are with the antlers off of a moose he had shot. Not a great picture of either of us, but in a quick search of my old photo albums, this is the best I could find. 

Miss you, Aunt Hi.