The Spinster Sisters of West Layton

Christmas Postcard 1929
Leonora, Alice, Victoria Jane, Elizabeth; Della on Alice's lap, Maddie on Grandmother Victoria's lap

Remember Me
Christina Rossetti

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

Memory is really all there's left of existence after death. An excellent book that explores this is A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier.

My memory of the the Aunts is that they were scary old women. They didn't offer candy, or anything, other than a kind of secret-filled silence. Of the three, Alice was the nicest. She gave out nickles as bribes for church attendance. She actually smiled. She also wrote copious journals, which all ended up in the city dump. That a life of words ends up thrown away is criminal and says much for the ticked-off relative who threw them out. Lizzy didn't speak and spent much of the visit with her arms crossed over her sunken stomach pushing herself into the sofa; Noan always seemed annoyed and in a hurry to be somewhere else. She wasn't the type to sit, and was prone to swearing, and meeted out verbal threats for infractions as insignificant as looking in the milk house: You little sonsabitches, I'll cut your gizzards out! She was a hoarder, a shopper, and talented pastel artist. Who knows where her drawings are now. I hope they escaped the city dump. I know of only two that survived.

On our weekly visits, the Aunts sat crumpled in the way old women crumple, bent over and wrinkled on the sofas in thier front parlor, which smelled like that peculiar scent of stuffy rooms and old people. They never married. They could hardly tolerate each other, and prepared and ate separate meals in silence. The Aunts wore their thin hair pulled tight against their skulls, up into tight buns. They wore plain cotton dresses, over which they tied an apron, as if to be always prepared for harvesting apples or crops. They wore practical shoes and rubber galoshes, and their hose always seemed to collect around their thin ankles. They were pencil thin, and drawn, and it was impossible to believe the beauties in the photos that lined the ornate piano and organ, were them.

The Aunts didn't suffer children. It was a requirement that children not fidget, and remain absolutely still and not speak unless spoken to. For me, this was impossible. I wanted to know who the people in the photos were, and kept pressing through the silence until I got an answer. Children weren't allowed upstairs, so it became a reality that there must be dead body, or evidence of a murder hidden upstairs. Perhaps, a great fortune was locked in a trunk. There was fortune: My father remembers jars of gold coins, and the few coins that Noan entrusted to him when she sent him to town to purchase groceries. I've read letters and have seen copies of canceled checks written for thousands, no small sum in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The story goes that it was my Uncle Tom, who broke my great-grandfather bank: Tom had been sent to Chicago to collect on a cattle sale, Tom gambled with the wrong sort, an urgent telegram arrived with the news that Tom would soon depart the earth by unpleasant means unless, so, send money in a hurry. Long story short: G-G sold his land in Canada, and more to save his son's life, said son returns to Utah, continues to gamble, drink, cavort, beat his children, smoke cigars, refuse to use an indoor toilet, drink until piece by piece diabetes does to him what the gangsters were paid off not to.

Lizzie died first, then Noan, yelling that a red Chinaman was in the front yard's Pine tree, then years later, Alice died. The land grab was a done deal before Alice died,and that's another story, and along with the current land grab on the other side of the family, it's the usual King Lear messiness, which I explore in my yet-to-be finished essay, Inheritance.

After their deaths, the majority of their belongings were hauled off to the dump, the gold coins disappeared and one particular relative purchased at least eight home or rentals. Go figure.