Aunt Nancy

There is something magical about the way certain people live in childhood memory.

My Aunt Nancy was one of those people for me.

She is eleven years older than me and thirteen years younger than my mom, placing her in that perfect space between child and adult. To me, she seemed impossibly glamorous. Fun. Beautiful. The kind of person whose arrival changed the atmosphere of a room.

She had long hair with a flip the way girls wore it in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and glasses that I always thought looked incredibly cool. When Nancy was around, you knew there would be fun.

She sang loudly, laughed easily, and had a dramatic streak that pulled the rest of us along with her. One time she dressed my little brother Mike up as a girl, using balloons to create a bosom while the rest of us dissolved into helpless laughter.

Nancy made ordinary days feel like something was happening.

Even now, most of my memories of Nancy feel bright around the edges.

I remember vividly her seventeenth birthday.

Her birthday was in June, and my brother and I were staying at the farm with Grammax and Grandpa Jesse. Grammax gave us paper and crayons so we could make birthday cards for Nancy. We sat outside at the picnic table in the front yard, carefully coloring and decorating them, completely delighted by the importance of it all.

I can still remember the feeling of anticipation as we waited to surprise her with them.

At the time, seventeen felt unimaginably sophisticated.

But when I think about it now, what moves me most is not Nancy’s glamour, although I loved that too. It is her kindness toward me.

The farmhouse always smelled faintly of campfire smoke and summer. The living room had a gold couch that sat in front of the window, and that is where Nancy would read the Little House on the Prairie books aloud to me.

We would sit there together for hours.

She never did dramatic voices for the characters. She simply read the stories straight through, turning the pages while late afternoon light came through the window beside us. Somehow that made it feel even more real, as though we were quietly stepping into another world together.

I loved those afternoons with an intensity only children can feel.

I always wanted one more chapter.

And then another.

I could hardly wait for later in the day when we would sit down again and continue the story. We hated Nellie Oleson together with complete and total conviction. Laura felt brave and familiar to me. The prairie itself felt real enough that I could almost smell it alongside the lingering campfire scent in the farmhouse walls.

Later, when I was a little older, I joined a summer swim team. One year we had a swim meet near the farm, and Nancy insisted that I spend the night there with her afterward.

There was a movie playing at the theater in the next town over, and she wanted us to go.

We went to see The Poseidon Adventure.

During the scary parts, we clutched each other’s arms in the dark theater like we were surviving the disaster ourselves. I was terrified.  And I loved every minute of it.

I can still remember the feeling afterward. The smell of popcorn lingering on our clothes. The excitement of being out late. The enormous importance of having been included in something that felt so grown up.

Later still, when I was in high school, Nancy would sometimes come spend weekends at our house. We would stay up late talking and watching movies while eating bowls of vanilla ice cream topped with strawberry jam.

At the time, it simply felt fun.

Now it feels like one of the quiet ways a person tells you that your company matters.

Even in college, I still described Nancy to my friends simply as “my fun aunt.”

The phrase never seemed large enough to hold everything she actually was to me.

Looking back now, I realize Nancy gave me more than childhood memories.

She gave me the experience of entering a story with someone I loved.

Long before I understood literature or writing, I learned that stories were places where people could meet one another.  We met on a gold couch in an old farmhouse.  We wandered the prairie with Laura. We despised Nellie Oleson together. We always hoped there would be time for one more chapter before supper.

I don’t think she intended to shape the course of my life.  She simply opened a book and made room for me beside her.

I think my life as a reader began on that gold couch.

And perhaps, though neither of us could have known it then, my life as a writer began there, too.