“An Advent Parable”
Pencil, pastel, and watercolor
2023
I was quite consciously missing my Aunt Martha (actually, my father’s first cousin, who died at age 87, just this past year) today. I was raised in what most folks these days would regard as an overly formal household, and one of my earliest memories is of Aunt Martha’s (she couldn’t have been more than 25 at the time) whisking me out of my great aunt’s/her mother’s house….to go to her APARTMENT (!!!!!!!). It was 1968. Aunt Martha had NOT married, and she had a job at the MEDICAL SCHOOL, and she painted watercolors, and she owned a volkswagen of her very own, and she regularly contradicted both her father and mine, and she was regarded as distressingly “wild”. We became fast friends (quite aside from our rather overbearing and utterly homogenous family) by the time I was ten. By the time I was 40 and she was sixty, I would introduce her, only half-jokingly, as “the other black sheep in the family”……We both forgot to get married. That said?…….I distinctly recall her taking me to her apartment (no single women had apartments back then, except for Mary Tyler Moore on television), where she had laid out all the cookie-molds and decorative candy-things (“non-pareils”?), powdered sugars, etcetera……for making and decorating sugar cookies.
I was, thrillingly enough, told that they were Christmas Cookies and would be MAILED OFF (!!!!!!). This was a Big Deal back then.
We started out from scratch (nothing special, I suppose….just the “Joy of Cooking” recipe; women in my family rarely cook and certainly don’t bake).
And, no…..she didn’t let me “just be creative”. She made me learn how to do it nicely. I was beyond thrilled. It may have been the first time anyone took the time to SHOW me how to make something and do it right….and, yes, I was (for perhaps the first time) very proud of the outcome/product. I felt quite grown-up and, more importantly, competent.
This one’s in memory of Martha. She was, indeed, a fine, early mentor and (later and until last year) an invaluable friend.