Poetry Friday: Leaving Auntieland

Look up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's SuperAunt! She can wipe runny noses. She can change diapers. She can pick up babies with a single hand.

My daughter and I are heading home from a week in Florida this Poetry Friday. 

That party animal Renee La Tulippe is hosting
Poetry Friday at No Water River today.

We flew down on Sunday to help my sister-in-law take care of my 16-month-old nephew. Julia got to be mother's helper and I was transformed into Auntie Laura.

Julia and Jagger are twelve years apart.

I love, as in lurve, being an auntie. Since my two children are teens, I get to enjoy little guy time via my two brother's children, who are six, two and a year-and-a-half (with a sibling on the way!)

Another benefit of being mom to big kids and auntie to small ones -- when I'm visiting, I can pretty much give my niece and nephews my full attention. Which means, to them, I am awesome.

Here are some memorable aunts in poetry.

Aunt Julia
by Norman MacCaig

Aunt Julia spoke Gaelic
very loud and very fast.
I could not answer her --
I could not understand her.

She wore men's boots
when she wore any.
-- I can see her strong foot,
stained with peat,
paddling with the treadle of the spinningwheel
while her right  hand drew yarn
marvellously out of the air.

Hers was the only house
where I've lain at night
in a box bed, listening to
crickets being friendly.

Read the rest at Scottish Poetry Library.

Aunt

BY AL YOUNG

She talks too loud, her face

a blur of wrinkles & sunshine

where her hard hair shivers

from laughter like a pine tree

stiff with oil & hotcombing

 

O & her anger realer than gasoline

slung into fire or lighted mohair

She’s a clothes lover from way back

but her body’s too big to be chic

or on cue so she wear what she want

People just gotta stand back &

take it 

Read the rest at the Poetry Foundation.

These aunts are Jersey Girls, like me.

My Aunts

by Meghan O'Rourke

Grew up on the Jersey Shore in the 1970s.

Always making margaritas in the kitchen,

always laughing and doing their hair up pretty,

sharing lipstick and shoes and new juice diets;

always splitting the bills to the last penny,

stealing each others clothes,

loving one another then turning and complaining

as soon as they walked out the door. Each one with her doe eyes,

each one younger than the last,

each older the next year, one year

further from their girlhoods of swimming

at Sandy Hook doing jackknives off the diving board.

Read the rest at Poets.Org.

My own memorable aunts both had big personalities, but could not have been more different. Aunt Jonnie (short for Jonine), is my father's sister. She's a New Yorker through and through. Type A -- have you ever noticed that the "a" in "Type A" is capitalized? Full of opinions. She used to take me to see Broadway plays when I was a high schoolers. Not musicals, but the plays, solidifying my love of literature. We've always  had great conversations together.

Auntie Mary was my mother's sister-in-law. An opinionated British red-head who was quick to laugh. She was a cozier aunt than Jonnie. She passed away in 2012 and my brothers and I remember her as a mother-figure, though we only saw her on annual visits to the U.K. when we were growing up.

Do you have a favorite (or quirky, men's boot wearing) auntie? Do tell! And if you're on the East Coast today, wave to Auntie Laura as Julia and I fly home to Maryland.

Mary Cassatt's "A Kiss for Baby Anne (no. 3)" at Wiki.

Could this be a loving auntie?