Aunt Lu

My Aunt Lu was my “fun” aunt. She and my mother’s brother, Uncle Roland, were unable to have children of their own, so they enjoyed everyone else’s.

Once a month or more, they would make the trip from across the state for a weekend visit with Grandma Mary who, after her stroke, lived first with us and later in a nursing home. It was always a treat to awaken on Saturday morning and find that Uncle Roland and Aunt Lu had arrived while I was asleep.

Sometimes they’d bring an extra surprise. Once it was a kitten for me. Other times it might be a sack of fresh oysters that Uncle Roland would shuck in the backyard for my mom to fry up as a delicacy for Grandma. Sometimes it was a grocery sack full of pecans from the old home place. Aunt Lu would spend the afternoon filling and refilling a baking pan with nuts, then cracking and picking them out.

At 4’10” Aunt Lu was little girl sized. To drive a car, she relied on a big red leather pillow placed behind her back to help her reach the pedal. It seemed she could barely see over the top of the steering wheel. When we nieces and nephews got to the age of ten or eleven, we’d reach the milestone of finding ourselves taller than she was. (I’ve served as that same sort of measuring stick for the next generation.)

Back home her life may have been more sophisticated with bridge partners, Eastern Star, and Mardi Gras balls. But at our house, she seemed to enjoy just watching Uncle Roland give my brothers haircuts on Saturday afternoons. After Saturday night suppers of smoked sausage and cornbread with Steen’s cane syrup, sometimes she would pop popcorn in the heavy old pot we used especially for that purpose. She loved to tease us all, and she played a merciless game of “Sorry.”

Sunday mornings would begin with Aunt Lu in her over-sized men’s pajamas eating her soft-boiled egg and toast. Then I would be privy to her transformation into a lady of glamour. I’d watch, fascinated, as she would apply rouge, lipstick, and Estee Lauder, then go in search of the cheek of one of my brothers to blot her lips. Soon afterward she and Uncle Roland would be off, with the rest of us standing outside to wave goodbye.

She and my daddy were the talkers in the family. In her distinctive “Noo Ahlins” accent, she could “tawk” and laugh for hours, sometimes while crocheting or doing other needlecraft projects. She was a perfectionist with a needle, and I treasure the things she made especially for me: an afghan, a muffler, a cross-stitch picture when Brooke was born.

After we lost both Daddy and Uncle Roland in 1975, things were quieter when Aunt Lu visited. It seemed that the fun part of her died when she lost Uncle Roland. Only when the great-nephews and nieces would come around would Aunt Lu make an attempt to be jolly once again.


For many years she could not mention Uncle Roland without tears. I remember her whispering to me one evening, “Jackie, it’s so hard.” She had always been religious, but in the years following Uncle Roland’s death, she turned to her Bible more and more.

I graduated from college and moved away, but Aunt Lu visited me a couple of times in Oklahoma and even came to Idaho when Steve and I married. Over the years, her old friends moved away or passed on, her only sister died, my mother – her traveling buddy- developed Alzheimer’s, and Aunt Lu became semi-bedridden and housebound. Loneliness, pain, and age began to take their toll on her mind.

By the time we moved back to Louisiana, Aunt Lu was in a nursing home. I didn’t break away to visit her more than once a year – sometimes less. The last time was about a year ago. Aunt Lu was blind and didn’t remember me. She seemed noticeably more childish than the last time I had seen her, so I tried to steer the conversation to things I thought she still might remember like her early days in old New Orleans. I asked if she remembered Roland. She looked a little puzzled then said, “Yeah, he was a fun guy,” and she grinned. I was glad that if she still remembered him at all, there was no pain in the memory anymore.

I received a call last weekend that Aunt Lu had passed away at the age of 93. It has been an emotional week as I’ve tried to help from a distance to see that arrangements were made for her burial. There is to be no funeral service.

When I told Aunt Lu goodbye last fall, she had a question for me. “Have I been a good girl?” she asked. Of course you know what I said.