My Mother's Sister

was like a second mother

Aunt Audrey as Matron of Honor at Mom’s wedding, 1957

Mom and Aunt Audrey were best friends and sisters. They both lived in St. Paul as young, single, switchboard operators before they married. Audrey worked at Northwestern Bell and Mom worked at the Farmers Labor Union. When Audrey married Uncle Al and moved north again to Warroad, she worked for the phone company there. Working wives and mothers, they lived hundreds of miles apart.

Letters. Phone calls. And the occasional Swenson family road trip north kept them connected. Nothing ever came between them.

Maybe that’s why I went to Warroad to see Aunt Audrey after Mom died in June of 2014. When I walked into Aunt Audrey’s kitchen that summer, it was like seeing my mother alive again.

She and Mom talked alike, laughed alike, and they both smelled like Jergens lotion. They gave each other perms and became Avon ladies and Girl Scout troop leaders. They shared secrets and sorrows.

My first memory of Aunt Audrey is her smile, laughing with me as a four-year-old in the log cabin where they lived in the Highland Park neighborhood of Warroad. Near the river and shaded by big old trees, the cabin looked like something out of a storybook and Aunt Audrey a fairy godmother.

Like Mom, Audrey spent every summer outside in her gardens. Flowers, flowering bushes, flowering trees. Lily of the Valley, Lilacs, Lilies. A big vegetable garden to feed the family for a year. Beans. Tomatoes. Chokecherry jelly. Strawberry jam. Garlic dill spears. Her salsa.

And wild blueberries.

Aunt Audrey knew exactly when and where to find them and packed a picnic lunch for us to make a day of picking several gallon buckets. To keep the mosquitos away, she’d slather Skin-So-Soft on every inch of exposed kid flesh and she kept an eye out for bear tracks. She’d freeze as many berries as she could to last the winter. There can be no finer dessert than a slice of her fresh-baked warm wild blueberry pie. Her crust is legendary.

Like Mom, Aunt Audrey sewed clothes for herself and kids. I remember sitting with her Montgomery Ward and Sears mail-order catalogs on a rainy summer day, looking for Butterick and McCalls patterns, then finding suitable fabrics and notions for new school clothes, all on my babysitter’s budget.

On rainy days, she’d send us kids down into the basement to play with Lincoln Logs and plunk the keys on the piano. My cousin Shireen took piano lessons and tried to teach me how to play “Do-Re-Mi” from The Sound of Music. Upstairs, Audrey ran the vacuum and baked a loaf of bread. I helped Aunt Audrey by doing dishes or hanging clean diapers on the clothesline to dry. Snapping beans or shelling peas.

As a kid, going up north felt like being on vacation from Mom and Dad because they weren’t in charge. Aunt Audrey and Uncle Al were.

Mandatory bed times at home were suspended when we were up north. So far north, daylight extended past 10 o’clock at night and when it finally got dark, Uncle Al would ask us kids if we wanted “lunch.” Sometimes there would be pie or brownies or cookies freshly baked by Aunt Audrey. Sometimes it was a bowl of vanilla ice cream with powdered Nesquick sprinkled on top.

Audrey loved kids. Five of her own. She helped raise her sisters’ children, and her kids’ children. And two generations of Warroad school children remember Audrey from her work for many years as a teacher’s aide.

Mt. Carmel Lutheran Church on Rocky Point Road

Aunt Audrey died on June 20 at the age of 92. These past ten years she had been like a second mother all over again. Like Mom, she took a passionate interest in history and geneaology. I learned from her about my own family history. Her funeral was held yesterday, Saturday, June 29, at Mt. Carmel Lutheran Church where she had been baptised. She is buried in Riverside Cemetery next to my Uncle Al.