Great Great Aunt Helen

My grandmother’s maternal aunt, Helen Marie Merrill, was born in 1893. She lived to be 98. When she married Lee Roy Short, who was five years her junior, she was almost 30. Most of what I know of her is from firsthand experience, which I will get to in a moment, but I would dearly love to track down the one story about her that completely fascinates me.

All I can imagine of her two-year adventure to Hawaii with Roy is that it must have been a wild one indeed. They arrived by ship on September 11, 1923, and returned to the states on August 25, 1925. During their time there, so I was told, Roy worked for “the phone company.” None of my research has yielded any sort of confirmation; there were no documents offering further explanation or enlightenment among the many saved papers I’ve come across over the years; and, except for now toying with the idea of going to Hawaii to research in newspaper archives and libraries, I’m at a bit of a loss to add substance to this part of her story. But, I haven’t given up on it because looking at photos of Hawaii from over 30 years before it became a state, gives me all kinds of scope for the imagination.

Even without the Hawaiian backstory, Helen was a woman of substance, and formidable to boot. My memory of her begins when I was about six years old. She was a crotchety old thing—70 years old—an age that is rapidly becoming almost my own. Aunt Helen didn’t exactly scare me, but she sure wasn’t much interested in kids. Having never had children herself (I suspect by choice) I suppose she feared that at any moment I might make the house fall down around her. Nevertheless, she was civil enough most of the time and took the time to notice my delight with two porcelain figures she’d bought during a side trip to Japan. The Lefton China Company crafted the figurines after Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie. When Aunt Helen died, her will stated that the figurines are to be given to my great great grand niece, Debra Jo, who spent hours admiring them. They sit in my home in a place of reverence to this day, which is why I think of Aunt Helen so often.

Helen is a hard one to forget in any case. On one particular visit, she had just finished baking some sugar cookies, which she’d then stored between sheets of wax paper in a tin box. As I stared at the porcelain figures in her curio cabinet, she stomped into the kitchen, grabbed the box off the top of the refrigerator, and stomped back to where I was sitting. She stood towering over me, though she was hardly more than 5' 2", took the lid off the box, shoved the box under my nose, and gruffly asked, “Want a cookie?” I looked wide-eyed up at her and in a squeaky mouse of a singsong voice replied shyly, “I don’t care.” She pulled the box away from me and responded huffily, “Well, I don’t care either.” With that, she slapped the lid back on and put the box back on top of the refrigerator. I learned in that moment, sans lecture or interpretation, that there are only two acceptable answers to many questions. Ever since, I have definitively answered either “Yes,” or “No.”

Copyright DJ Anderson, 2018

Aunt Helen in 1945