Jane

Just whistle a bit, if the day be dark,

and the sky be overcast.

If mute be the voice of the piping lark,

why, pipe your own small blast!

Just whistle a bit, if your heart be sore;

'Tis a wonderful balm for pain.

Just whistle some old melody o'er and o'er

Till it soothes like a summer rain.

- Faded poem on the bathroom wall in the old farmhouse

I met my soon-to-be new aunt at the old barn. Not an old barn, the old barn. The Century Farm had officially been in her family since 1884 and she was the fourth generation to work it. Unofficially, her distant relatives had homesteaded the land for years prior. The fifth generation, my two younger cousins in-the-making, stood on the packed snow and peered shyly around a corner of peeled paint and flaking old wood, eyes wide with curious giggles. The sagging doorway behind them outlined their shapes as if for a photograph. An uncle on my mom’s side would be marrying them all into the family the following week.

I was ten. I had finally talked my parents into getting me a horse and we were there to pick the old guy up. He was stout, and a gorgeous deep shade of red, his coat shaggy in the cold winter. I remember that he seemed dozens of feet tall to my child-self, and that he smelled good, like warm hay, notwithstanding the season. But, what I will always remember most about that day is meeting my new aunt.

She had a smile that could help light the world, and it reached her eyes, crinkling them at the corners and making them dance. It was so genuine that you could feel it aching in your chest.

I watched, rapt, as she moved about Red, feet crunching on the dirtied snow, her gentle tone and demeanor putting us all immediately at ease. The amount of care and respect she had for him was apparent in her voice and in her movements. They were soft like a gently burbling stream as she explained to me that, despite its size, a horse could feel a fly anywhere on its body. He snorted, as if to agree, their expended breaths both condensing in the cold and drifting towards the door of the barn.

Even bundled as we were against the winter temperatures in the foothills, she managed to smell like wild adventure and homespun coziness all at once.

Her rich brown hair was strewn carelessly with gold that caught the weak winter light, and it tumbled down past her Stetson, over her ears, onto her shoulder, and across her temple as she bent to pick up Red’s foot. Her strong, dexterous, and elegantly weathered fingers carefully, carefully slid down his front leg and twined in the hair behind his fetlock, lifting the hoof and exposing its underside. I marveled that something so large and strong would so quickly and delicately concede to her ask. I had no doubts, she was absolutely magic.

Though I was significantly closer in age to my two younger cousins, every subsequent visit to the farm focused, for me, entirely on my uncle and aunt. They were untamable and intoxicating for my young soul. I craved basking in the emotional warmth of that small, old church-turned-schoolhouse-turned farmhouse only to punctuate our days with novel activity. Perhaps it’s that we only ever visited while we were on vacation, or that it was just so different than what I was used to, but adventure seemed to abound whenever we were there, and one or both of them were always the ringleaders for our happy circus.

One of the things that I have always appreciated about my family is that everyone helps as they are able. So, while my dad, brother, and I kept up with dishes, my aunt would create wondrous things in the kitchen. Since my mom was a fairly excellent cook I was difficult to impress, culinarily speaking, but the biscuits, gravy, fried eggs, cookies, and even just plain toast that came out of that kitchen were different. Maybe it was the crisp air coming down from the mountains, the promise of fun yet to be had, or her own deft sprinkling of love and mischief – but to this day I cannot explain it, though I still remember meals there ever so fondly.

One day during a visit in my mid-teens, she asked me – just me! – if I wanted to go for a drive with her. We took the small, blue, flatbed pickup truck onto gravel back roads, deeper into the foothills. I wasn’t technically old enough to drive, but once we were probably no longer in danger of being caught, we switched seats and I practiced on those steep, winding lanes under her tutelage. While I drove, she told me stories. She told me about marrying her first and second husbands. I listened, slightly wide-eyed, as she told me about being arrested in Texas for insulting the cops when they raided the bar she bartended at during her 20s. And we both laughed as she recounted traveling cross-country in a Volkswagen Bug with a Great Dane who had diarrhea. We talked about life, and love, and loss, and happiness, and dreams for the future for hours, until it was time to turn back, travel past the old barn, and come to a stop again in front of the farmhouse.

Over the years I stayed at the farm for a week or two at a time. During one summer, I rode in the backseat of a white Chevy pulling a large white livestock trailer with a prize-winning Corriente bull named Carlos on a family trip to a cattle convention in New Mexico. Sometimes I picked pears from the old pear tree in the orchard or beans with my aunt in her garden. A few times I helped out at the domestic violence shelter she opened and ran for a few years. Once I was a guest at a local Kiwanis club meeting with her. I changed pipe in the pasture, and she taught me how to milk her dairy cow, feed the chickens, and collect eggs in the mornings.

The last time I saw my aunt was at the old barn. Not an old barn, the old barn. My wife and I had been to the farm for a visit. I had wanted to share my childhood with her and had been able to, to some small extent. A lot of it just wasn’t the same, though. Yes, we were in the same place, doing some of the same things, but my aunt wasn’t there. Unlike State workers, family farmers don’t get paid vacation, and sometimes it’s more of a hassle to get an inexperienced hand’s help than to just do it yourself. We would visit with her in the evenings, and the enchantment would again be upon me, but during the day we went our separate ways – her to tending the cows and pastures, bringing in hay, and community commitments and us to hiking, visiting the lake, and being tourists against the gorgeous backdrop of the foothills. The day we were to leave, we stopped by the old barn on our way out of town to give my aunt one last hug and thank her for letting us stay in the guest bedroom. I was driving when we left, so I couldn’t look back.

Since those days, time has worn on. She is no longer married to my uncle, and though we have each other’s contact information, we have lost touch. The bittersweet irony of our lives is that they are now probably more closely related than they were before and, at the same time, could not be more different. She continues to live in a small, conservative, rural community, and the farm and her grandkids are her life. On the other hand, I live outside of a major U.S. city, have a 9-5 job with the state I live in, and lean more liberal than most. However, we both have gardens and homesteads to different degrees, we both keep bees, we both care about the environment, respect animals, are intensely engaged in social and political analysis and issues through our own respective lenses, and have deep roots connecting us to the earth. It is a profound and wounding loss to me that we have never gotten to know each other as adults. I miss her horribly, though I honestly can’t say how we’d get on as adults, I am scared that our lives are just too far apart at this point. But, all of that being said, I have no doubt that my aunt is still absolutely magic.