“Aunt Gracie had a boyfriend? Are you serious?”
My cousin, Thelma, and I are having coffee in her kitchen before I head home to Wisconsin. I have come to Tennessee to attend Aunt Gracie’s funeral, and have stayed on for several days to help Thelma settle the affairs.
Aunt Gracie, in her late 90s, with her hair coiled high, away from her face all around, in the style of the ‘40s, died as quietly and as naturally as she had lived, as she stooped to pluck a tomato in her garden.
Her house is set at the side of a hill. My mother once told me how Gracie, shrieking in anguish, had grappled her way to the top of that hill more than 70 years before, after her firstborn died of diphtheria. Aunt Gracie’s husband passed away in the ‘60s, and with her remaining children grown, she had eked out a living for herself cleaning the finance office in town each night. She had led a quiet, simple life, seeing to her garden and giving small stipends at church.
“His name was Estil,” Thelma says. Her words are soft and cautious, as if she is speaking of some conspiracy. “Mom referred to him as her ‘friend.’”
“When was this?”
“Oh, in the ‘70s, I think.”
I mentally count back. “Well, that would have put her in her late 70s when she met Estil. Right? Oh, Thelma, I think that’s so cute! A boyfriend—at that age!”
Thelma shrugs and says, “I guess so.”
Aunt Gracie met Estil when a nursing home was constructed next to her property. Estil, a widower, had been one of the residents there. He and Gracie had become acquainted through church. They had taken to zipping around the hilly back roads in Estil’s old jalopy, laughing and holding hands like school kids. Thereafter, when Thelma visited her mother, she would often find herself pacing the floor, waiting for Gracie to return from one of their jaunts. When Thelma found out that Estil occasionally had black-out spell, she went into a tizzy.
“Mom, what if he blacks out while driving around one of those hills and you fly off the edge?”
“Well, then we’ll both go over together and I will have died happy,” Aunt Gracie had replied.
“What was Estil like?” I ask now.
Thelma described an unassuming strip of a man who had courted Aunt Gracie in polyester bell-bottom suits and scented toilet water. About two years into the courtship, Estil suddenly died. Fortunately, he and Gracie were not out driving at the time.
“He wasn’t handsome like Daddy was.” Thelma pauses for a long moment, gazing out the window. I figure she’s thinking about Gracie’s work, scrubbing floors and emptying trash well into her 70s.
“They looked like Mutt and Jeff together. Estil was a lot shorter than Mom, but she said he was the love of her life. Do you recall that suit you found hanging in her closet? It was Estil’s. Mom got it from the nursing home after he died and held onto it all these years.”
Yes, I remembered the suit. The pants had the flared bottoms and bold striped pattern of the ‘50s and ‘60s. I’d thought perhaps it had belonged to Thelma’s father. When I’d patted the pockets down before placing it in the donation box, however, I’d discovered a vintage Valentine card inside the breast pocket—one of those with a friendship verse on it that kids exchanged at school. “I’ve SET SAIL For Your Heart” it had read. It had begun to shade off at the edges from age. It was signed, “Love, Gracie.”
A while later, Thelma and I say our goodbyes and I head home. Driving across Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and finally into Wisconsin, I reflect on a woman who, for most of my life, I’d assumed to have no passions or desires other than nurturing her children and attending to her garden. Then I think of that suit, with the Valentine tucked inside the pocket, hanging in a closet for more than 30 years.
I realized that a passion for romantic love doesn’t necessarily cease to exist with age.