Yesterday afternoon we welcomed our daughter and her family over for Easter dinner. In most years this would not have been astonishing. However, this April 4 was the first time we sat down together in our house since March of 2020. I had hoped that Charlie and I would be able to complete the vaccination process with both doses and the required 14 day wait afterwords in time for Easter. We passed the 14 mark on March 30 which made it possible to plan this reunion.

While I felt the absence acutely in the beginning of the pandemic, I had gradually become used to a pretty isolated existence. Sure I saw people on Zoom. Yes in warmer weather we visited outside at a fair distance. But there was no hugging, no animated conversation, no sitting around a table. After a while, I am sad to say, it began to feel normal, albeit a new normal. Yesterday deeply reminded me that there is no substitute for proximity, no alternative for hugs, no way to play Jenga six feet away from everyone.

Yes, we played Jenga after the dishes were cleared. A game which looks simple involving a stack of little wooden blocks, turns out to be highly challenging. Each player has to remove one block without the whole thing tumbling. Then the player puts that block atop the remaining structure and the next player takes over. My grandson terms himself a Jenga champion, and that proved to be true. He was able to very quickly extract one block while the whole tower fell into place without falling over.

As for me. Well let’s just say that I cook a better Easter dinner than I win at Jenga.

Yesterday I was staring at the door to the broom closet and laughed at the array of rubber bands. I have put rubber bands here for years without really thinking about it. (Quarantine allows a lot of time to think about things that I would never have thought about. Is that a positive or a negative?) Some of them break when I try to use them, but in general I always have a rubber band handy when I need one.

My husband’s and my parents were both children of the depression. While my mother and his father were comfortable during that time, my father and his mother lived in great poverty. Regardless of their circumstances, they all seemed very ingrained with the notion of “waste not, want not.” The lights had to be shut off when we left a room. (Are we running an electric company around here?) The furnace went off at night.(That’s why we have sweaters.) No food ever went to waste.(You said you wanted those license plates in the Kix boxes. Now eat all that cereal.)

The rubber band collection is a relic of that frame of mind. Why buy rubber bands when they come free on asparagus? I am curious about what other frugal habits any of my readers picked up from the generations before them. Please share.

As I thought about Boy Scouts now including girls in their troops, I spent a while reflecting on the whole transformation of once single sex settings to coed ones. I am not including any discussion about what my questionnaires now routinely include: alternatives to male and female. I am restricting my comments to a sense of single sex settings familiar to anyone over 50.

I participated in a Camp Fire Girls group for all of elementary school and went every summer to a girls’ camp pictured above. Our counselors were young women, and the staff was entirely female. We did archery, swimming, arts and crafts, singing, rowing, weaving and general running around. Free of boys, we felt unconscious of what we were wearing, what we looked like, and whether we would be teased. I looked forward to it each summer.

In college I lived in an all girl dormitory. Boys were only allowed upstairs for two hours on Sunday afternoons and the door had to be left ajar. We ran from our rooms to the communal bathroom in underwear, curlers, and mud masks. The pressure to look “presentable” didn’t exist.

In college I taught a women’s studies class in rural Oregon which was attended by women only(by choice, not regulation.) Here my students talked about being hurt in their marriages, being raped as young women, wanting to live alone, resenting their children, and other topics “taboo” in the 1970’s. It was the first time most of them had ever shared any of these things.

Colleges once women only began accepting men many years ago. Colleges once only for men did the same over time. Dormitories are now coed. Camp Fire Girls is now called Camp Fire and boys and girls go to my old camp. Men take women’s’ studies classes.

From my point of view something precious has been lost. The effect of what has now been called the “male gaze” didn’t disappear when men and women began to routinely share spaces. I needed that male free time growing up. I can’t speak for boys, of course.

I welcome any thoughts about this change from my readers. If you have never known anything different, I would love to hear from you too.

When I first started posting to the internet, my daughter warned me to never post anything that I wouldn’t want available to the whole world for all time. I have followed her caution, and have kept peoples’ names and images off my posts if the people are still living. I have, as is clear from my recent posts about Aunt Cary, put up names and images of some no longer alive.

However, as I prepared to write about the advantages and disadvantages of single sex settings, including Camp Fire Girls, summer camp and the Barbizon Hotel, I startled. There among the images I searched on Google for Camp Fire was a photo of me, sleeping bag over my shoulder, waiting to go to camp. I had posted that image myself some while back. I think that while theoretically I knew that Google searched everything all the time, I had failed to really comprehend the implications of that.

The good news is that if someone were to click that image she would be directed to my blog, thereby increasing my readers. But still it was a bit unsettling. So take this as a gentle reminder. Don’t post anything you don’t want available to the whole world for all time! Thank goodness I don’t mind the image of that plucky camper available to all.

Spring comes to New England at the end of March, and its first signs are beginning to appear. Here a bed of snow drops, surrounded by the pine straw mulch, have made their appearance. The squirrels are chasing each other around with amorous intent. Male cardinals sing their hearts out. While we haven’t yet seen the robins return to nest under the deck, we are keeping our eye out. Two nights ago unseasonable warmth allowed us to eat outside, socially distanced, from family members we had only seen out the window for months.

A less welcome sure sign of spring is the roar of another motorcycle, still convinced that the three block straightaway of our street cries out for speed and noise. Clearly these over the hill riders remain unconvinced that their wide open highways are behind them!

Snow still remains possible with the last frost expected around April 30. While the ground is still too hard to turn over, Charlie has been able to prune the vines of grape and raspberry and cut back the blueberry bushes. A great beginning to a warmer and brighter time of year.

I first started writing about Aunt Cary inspired by the recently published book about the Barbizon Hotel in New York City where she once resided. Then when I began to remember so much more about our relationship I added a number of blog posts. What I hadn’t realized was that while I knew of Cary’s descent into what we would now call bi-polar disorder it might would startle my readers. I also hadn’t known that readers would be moved by my experiences with her.

I write very little about my family of origin, respecting their privacy. However, what is true is that I never had the opportunity to grieve my relationship with Cary with them. The only story that stayed alive in my family was that Cary took her life in 1969. While that is grievously true, it is the least important part of the story of Cary. As I wrote the posts, I came to truly understand that she was so much more than her death. Her laughter, her energy, and her love, were essential parts of her.

We know so much more about bi-polar disorder today, but it still claims far too many sufferers. Whether in a manic phase feeling invulnerable or in a depressive phase seeing no reason to go on, the disease removes the person from the center where they are truly themselves. I hope that my writings paid tribute to that wonderful core that was Aunt Cary.

And I also pause to note her other favorite words which pepper my speech to this day: hoot, snazzy, and of course, ort.

Caroline Niles Carpenter December 22, 1930- November 27, 1969

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Much loved, much missed. Further reflections tomorrow.

The last time I saw Aunt Cary was in February of 1969. My paternal grandmother had died and a service was held in a New York City funeral home. The service was void of any meaning since the presider had no information about her. The only attendees were my father, his brother my uncle, several cousins, me and Aunt Cary. This grandmother was tolerated rather than loved, and there was not much grieving going on.

As we stepped out of the gloom of the stark room onto West 43th Street, Cary exclaimed, “Let’s all go to Sardi’s and have a drink!” It was the perfect suggestion to cap off a dreadful early afternoon. We walked over to West 44th, pushed a couple of tables together, and all had a drink. No one goes to Sardi’s on a non Broadway afternoon, so we had the place and the autographed caricatures to ourselves.

I will always remember that afternoon as Cary brought our sorry group out of the secret guilt we all held from our lack of grief. Laughter, a drink, jokes, and tales about everything except Gran redeemed the time.

While that was the last time Aunt Cary came to Oregon, it was not the last time I saw her. Fortunately she gained some stability and moved back to New York City where she had been living before her breakdown landed her with her parents in Chicago. She took up residence in the Barbizon Hotel, recently featured in the book just published by Paulina Bren, shown above. It was seeing this book title that actually sent me first to buy the book and then to begin to remember my life with Aunt Cary.

From 1965 through June of 1969 I lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a three hour bus ride away from Manhattan. I went there numerous times, staying with either friends or relatives in suburban New York City. On one of those visits I arranged to meet Aunt Cary outside The Barbizon. I am sorry that I never got a peek inside, but the book has given me a good sense of why she may have lived there. While she worked on and off, I believe that my grandparents helped support her financially. They would have felt reassured that she was living in an all female, doorman guarded, building in a respectable part of the City.

She was delighted to see me and insisted we must go to the place “where business men took their paramours in the afternoon.” We walked perhaps twenty minutes over to The Russian Tea Room. I remember being awestruck by the over the top decorations and kept looking for any furtive looking men in suits. It was great fun, though I doubt we spotted any.

I bid her goodbye and went back uptown to friends.

By the next and last time that Aunt Cary came to visit us in Oregon, something seemed different. I was about to enter high school and was pretty occupied with myself, but still felt an unwelcome sense of unease some of the time I spent with her. She stayed awake most of the night then slept late in the morning. She talked faster and seemed restless in a way I somehow unconsciously noticed. Only in looking back now can I clearly describe what I experienced then. At the time the only awareness I had was that she and my mother argued a lot about her sleeping pattern. In retrospect I don’t think my mother understood what was happening either.

For a break from the tension and a treat for my aunt, she, my mother and I went to the Oregon Coast for two nights. Above is a photo I love of Aunt Cary at Cannon Beach that September of 1961. Fortuitously enough, I “became a woman” the first evening. Who better than Aunt Cary who whooped, opened a bottle of sherry and toasted my maturation? My practical mother went to the store for supplies. I needed them both that time.

The next time I saw her was in Chicago on my way to college in 1965. She was a patient in the Illinois State Hospital, in a locked ward, deeply depressed and unkempt. I was heart sick to see her in such pain. Still she grinned at me and in true Aunt Cary fashion said “You look quite collegiate.” I felt blessed once again.