My Aunt Dede

My cousin John reminded me that today is his mother's birthday.  His mother is my aunt Kay (I called her Dede) who died in 1992.  She was one of my mother's two sisters and she, along with my mother, was a force of nature.  I loved her dearly and was always amazed at how she raised six sons and maintained an amazingly good humor. 

In honor of my aunt Dede, I'd like to share a funny story my mother once told me.  When I was just a year old, my parents and I lived on one side of a duplex.  My aunt, uncle, and cousins John and Steve lived on the other side. 

When we moved in, the yard was not fenced in and the two sisters and their husbands decided they needed to remedy that so their young children could play outside.  The men said they would dig the holes for the fence posts if the women would order the cement, so my mother contacted a cement company and ordered a small amount.  When the cement truck showed up, the driver still had a large load of cement in his truck, but this was his last stop for the day, so he asked the sisters if they would like everything he had.  "Sure," they said and he left a huge mountain of cement in front of their garage.

When the men got home they moved as fast as they could to dig the holes and fill them with cement before it dried, but there was too much cement and by the next day there was a hard pile of cement blocking entrance to the garage.  The pile of cement remained there for months until a tornado showed up one day and lifted the garage, depositing it several blocks away.

My mother only told me this story a few years before she died, and she laughed until she cried remembering their predicament. And I laughed, too.  I could picture Mom and Dede, in housedresses and aprons, looking like Lucy and Ethel, getting themselves into another fix.