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Aunt Myrtle

Aunt Myrtle was one of my maiden aunts. She had lost the love of her life in some horrible explosion. I remember wondering and dreaming about it because no one would ever tell us kids how it had happened. We made up stories of spies and bombs and things. I liked the one about him giving his life-saving someone from a burning car that exploded too soon. Years later I found out that he was killed when his whiskey still blew up. Her house scared us kids. We were never allowed out of the kitchen. The men never liked it either. If they smoked, they had to do it outside and if they chewed, they weren’t let into the house until Aunt Myrtle made sure they had empty mouths and nothing in their pockets. I don’t think even the roughest of them ever tried to fool her. Her house always smelled of Lysol and closed up trunks of old clothes and books. I would say musty, but it would never have dared go into her place.

Anyway, I want to tell you about her and the squirrel. It happened at Uncle Harry’s and Aunt Dot’s place. They had one of those big old houses with twelve thousand rooms, a big porch, and it had Lilacs and Roses to make the yard smell pretty. Later in the summer, there were Tiger Lilies to paint your face with and play Indians. At Thanksgiving, you could make footprints in the frost on the windows as the loving smells of all your favorite foods filled the house. And so it seemed natural that when Uncle Harry’s and Aunt Dot’s only daughter got married –they had ten boys — we’d all come to the wedding and stay there, even Aunt Myrtle.

Uncle Harry had been fighting a battle with the squirrels in his neighborhood. In several places, they had chewed through the old cedar shingles and were living in the roof. Somehow Uncle Harry knew Aunt Myrtle wouldn’t like the idea of squirrels running around over her head so he and a couple of the boys put sheet metal patches over the holes the day before we all got there for the wedding. They forgot to make sure all of the squirrels were out before they did it.

Here’s what happened the first night we were there as I figured it out. One of the squirrels finding the sheet metal tough chewing gnawed its way into Aunt Myrtle bedroom. What it did next made no sense at all to anybody — it crawled into bed with Aunt Myrtle! She screamed. It woke everybody up. She kept screaming. The men tried to ignore it and go back to sleep. They knew no one would ever dare to attack Aunt Myrtle. One of them told me later he figured she had found a dust bunny or something. Us kids and some of the women went running to see what was going on and about the time I got there the door to Aunt Myrtle’s bedroom flew open and out came the squirrel. Aunt Myrtle was right behind. She pegged a bottle of Lilac water at it. She’d a nailed it too if it hadn’t jumped over the banister and beat it down the steps. Aunt Myrtle’s stock with me went up even more when she let loose a stream of words that would have made any sailor proud, then she turned and stalked back into her bedroom. That was about the most fun at the whole wedding, excepted when Cousin Willy knocked over one of the punch bowls melting the bottom layer of the wedding cake just before the party got going, but that’s another story for another time.