GREAT AUNT FLONNIE

I didn’t discover Great Aunt Flonnie until she was 95 years old. Yes, I knew she had married my grandmother’s brother, but I had never met her or her family. It wasn’t until one of her daughters wrote asking for information about my family because she was working on geneology that I even gave much thought to my mother’s/grandmother’s family in Tennessee.

My mother gave birth to me in Tennessee in Clark County which is just one county over from Oneida where Great Aunt Flonnie lives. My mom and my grandmother left there where I was a year old; and while my mother’s brothers often returned to Tennessee, neither she nor my grandmother ever expressed an interest in going back for a visit.

Of course, I provided the information requested and after thinking about it for a while, wrote back to this long-lost cousin and told her my husband and I were coming to visit. It wasn’t until after we arrived in Oneida and were waiting for my cousin to pick us up that I became filled with anxiety:

“Oh my God, what have I done? What if they don’t like me? What if I don’t like them? What was I thinking?”

We followed my cousin out to Great Aunt Flonnie’s home. She, another daughter and a man there to trim some trees were all outside. With great trepidation, I stepped out of the car, only to be met with outreached arms and:

“My land, I woulda knowed you was family anywhere, You look just like Adee [my grandmother] did the last time I saw her.” (all with a strong southern accent)

Enveloped in the arms of this tiny woman (85 pounds soaking wet), her words like music in my ears, trepidation and fears disappeared. For the next three days I was enchanted by this woman, her stories about her life and the various places she and her daughter took me and my husband to visit. I really need to get those stories down and will do so on this blog as time goes by.

This visit to Tennessee and Great Aunt Flonnie was the first of two. I returned five years later to be there with her and her family to celebrate her 100^th birthday. I tried to take her some homemade peach jam, but those nasty examiners at the airport confiscated it, so I had to settle for purchasing some small suncatchers which were immediately hung in her windows. I had purchased a card that wished her a Happy 100^th Birthday and which I noticed she removed from the basket of cards time and again as though it was a special treasure.

Great Aunt Flonnie was wished Happy Birthday by that fellow on the morning show, and President and Mrs. Obama, interviewed by the local paper, local television stations, and honored with recognition from a variety of people and organizations. It was wonderful to see this tiny woman with all her faculties intact laughing and joking and enjoying this great day even though she indicated she didn’t really think it required all this fuss.

When I left Oneida, I promised I would be back to celebrate her 105^th. She told me she didn’t think she’d be around by then even though she had just recently given up driving herself to Sunday School and the nursing home to visit her younger sister, was living alone, and had the previous summer (as always) planted a huge garden and frozen and canned the results.

The reason I’m writing about Great Aunt Flonnie today is that she has once again returned home from the hospital, her recovery being termed a “miracle” by her doctors.  This happened once already just before her 104^th birthday and the emails I received then indicated this was most likely it, she wouldn’t survive. Well, she surprised everyone and made it to 104, then 105 this past January.

Once again in the last couple of weeks, emails indicated Great Aunt Flonnie would most likely not see 2015. My cousin’s email from yesterday said the doctors had predicted she wouldn’t live through that first night. Now, she was home, could talk on the phone, eat and drink bits throughout the day, and sit on the bedside for a few minutes at a time. She’s very weak, but so happy to be home and seeing the sunshine.

The downside of this is, of course, that Great Aunt Flonnie may be bedridden from this point forward. After the last episode like this, she was unable to live alone so her second eldest daughter moved in with her and she began to use a wheelchair. Even so, Great Aunt Flonnie loved her daily car rides and visits to the park. She was even the Grand Marshall of the big high school parade this fall. The school was celebrating 100 years and honored Great Aunt Flonnie as the oldest living graduate and valedictorian of her class.

Unfortunately, I didn’t make it to number 105 which was just as well as my cousin, her caretaker, was quite ill at that time. But, if Great Aunt Flonnie continues to improve and reaches number 106 in January, I really think I’d like to go back; and, if nothing else, sit beside her bed and tell her how much I want to be just like her when I grow up.