NELMA

When I was young I remember my mom telling me a story about her older sister, Nelma, getting mad because the grass in front of their house wasn’t mowed. The family was too poor to afford a mower, so Nelma took a pair of scissors outside and mowed the front grass! WITH SCISSORS! Nelma’s Dad, my Grandfather, was angry at her for her foolishness, partly because there was plenty of work to be done if she wanted to do something and partly due to his own embarrassment at not being able to afford a mower (or now, most likely, a sharp pair of scissors). Grandma was able to shoo him away, somehow she knew that Nelma just needed to do what she was going to do. There’s a time to just stand back, and let it be, and soothe the blisters afterward.

At the time I didn’t fully understand the story.  I didn’t understand that the “grass in front of the house” was not the suburban yards of my youth but the course, dry, dusty stalks of a farm yard. I didn’t understand “not being able to afford a mower” was really the deep grinding poverty of the great depression, where cold and hunger and worry were your constant companions and the pain of your dusty desperation would drive you to do crazy things like taking the scissors to the yard. I didn’t fully understand the hours that it would take, the hot sun on your shoulders, the blisters on your fingers, the thirst, the hungry knot in your stomach, the dusty, clenched jaw grit it would take.

Mom told me that story when I was little, very little, so little that I didn’t know my Aunt well at that time.  I would know her very well eventually and that story would never be far from my thoughts of her.  Here was a woman who would mow the lawn with a pair of scissors if you pissed her off just right.

By the time I got to know my Aunt Nelma she had already lost her first husband. He drown on a mission trip in the jungles of South America. The river had stolen his body and she had only the ghost of his swarthy handsomeness in the faces of her children to remember him by. Despite her loss Nelma soldiered on with a smile and a laugh and rock solid faith in the mercy of Jesus Christ. Like all things Nelma it was complicated, but somehow I was always aware that she was a woman who had had her heart broken and she had picked it up and taped it back together and crammed it back into her chest. She never lost her faith. She never lost her zeal.

Nelma was big and bold, part woman and part thunderstorm. She filled up the room with a giant laugh, or a song, or a story, or a silly rhyme. She was challenging to be around. She never let you off the hook with the short answer, she wanted to know what you’d been up to, and why you’d up to it and what you planned to do next. She was audacious, bright as sunshine and twice as warm. She wasn’t afraid to ask you what you thought and then make you re-think it. You always knew where you stood with Nelma, you always knew what she believed in and she always believed in you. You always, always knew that behind it all Nelma loved you as big and bright and brashly as she loved life.  My heart always beat a little faster when I was around her.

Lately the Aunt Nelma I knew has been trapped within a failing mind and body that would not allow her to shine as bright as she once did. That is over for her now. She has passed on to the heaven she knew was waiting for her.  I am sure she arrived with one of those big brass bands playing “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In.”  

Only when you have been so desperately poor, could you know where true wealth lies.  Only when you’ve drunk from a bitter river of loss can you truly sing and only when the earth has claimed your body and freed you from the humus of antiquity will you truly, truly dance.