Aunt Roxie
My beloved Aunt Roxie passed away in January. She was my mom’s sister, one of six girls of 13 siblings. She was my “second mom” in the family; I spent every school break with her and my Uncle Preston starting when I was four years old. Yet I realized as I reflected on her significance in my life, I don’t know that a single photograph exists of just the two of us together.
I still remember the first time I climbed into the back seat of Roxie’s big white 1970’s boat-of-a-sedan and was buckled in with a lap seatbelt (there were no shoulder harnesses back then). It’s a wonder a seatbelt was used at all, because in most of my memories of driving with Aunt Roxie I’m standing up next to her in the front seat while she blasted down the highway. Foxy Roxy, as she became known both for her good looks and her spunk, liked to drive fast and there are lots of stories related to her need for speed. For a while, another vehicle she had was a big two-door black sedan with a white vinyl roof, nicknamed the Flying Nun. The name came from the 1960’s TV show, but also came about because one time as Roxie sped down the highway, the hood wasn’t latched properly. It lifted, flying up toward the windshield with such ferocity that the corners of the hood closest to the windshield bent at 90 degree angles, having every appearance of winglets on the vehicle. She never did have them repaired. Another quick story… once, we were driving from the tiny town where Roxie lived to a larger town nearby and were almost out of gas. I was worried we would be stranded on the highway and begged aunt Roxie to drive slower so the gas would last longer. She laughed and said she was driving fast so as to get to the station quicker, before the gas ran out. We made it to the next town, and though it wasn’t the only close call I had with her in a vehicle, I never felt unsafe, and I don’t know that she ever had an accident or was issued a speeding ticket.
I always loved Aunt Roxie’s name- I found it bold and a bit sassy, and admired my grandmother’s flair in choosing it, rather than a plain or serious name, which never would have suited Roxie, and she would have missed out on all the fun of being Foxy Roxy, which I think she quite enjoyed.
Aunt Roxie was reportedly a wild teen, but she was twenty-five when I was born and already married nearly six years, so I never knew that side of her. When I started spending time with her and Uncle Preston, who she married one month before her nineteenth birthday, she seemed an older matronly woman in charge of every situation. Another of her nicknames was “Mother Hen” and it suited her. She mothered, cared for, and loved every small creature that came her way, whether stray nieces like me, or orphaned baby lambs called “pinkos.” Every spring during lambing season she cared for a misfit flock of lambs whose mama’s had died, or birthed multiples (ewes, due to simple anatomy, can usually only nurse two babies) or had otherwise rejected them. Aunt Roxie housed the lambs under a heatlamp in her shed, or brought them into the warmth of her kitchen when necessary, and bottle fed them three times a day. She truly loved them, administered medicine when they had “the scours,” and mourned them when they died.
There wasn’t a creature that could escape Aunt Roxie’s careful mothering, which perhaps was a result of her own inability to have a baby. In their mid-thirties, she and Uncle Preston adopted a girl and then a boy, and they were her greatest joy. She had hoped for so long to be a mother, evidenced by a closet full of baby clothes and nursery items she kept in a bedroom upstairs. I used to sneak in and play with the collection of tiny frilly dresses- holding and rocking them as though a baby were wearing them, despite they were still on hangers- and dream of having babies of my own, one day. Though we never once discussed it, Aunt Roxie and I shared the heartache of infertility; she never bore a child, and I don’t even know if she experienced pregnancy. I would struggle in my 30’s and 40’s to have a baby, experiencing five miscarriages before finally having a son just before I turned 45.
Aunt Roxie had a memory for details and could recount stories for hours of day-to-day life in her small community, sitting around her kitchen table with any captive audience. In my late teens and early 20’s, I would drive the four hours between my home town and Aunt Roxie’s, sometimes leaving after school or work, showing up in her kitchen very late at night. Roxie would usually be in a recliner in the living room, would come into the kitchen to make sure I got something to eat, and sit with me at the kitchen table. We would talk- correction- she would talk, for an hour or two, recounting events in the no-stoplight town where she lived: who had married, who had died, who had a baby and what it was named. Though she gave her own children unique names- one after a fabric, simply because she liked the sound of the word; the other after half of the name of the Empire State because she though it sounded regal- she often shook her head at the names others gave to their children. “Wicken James, can you believe that?” she would say. It didn’t help that people living there put all the creative juice they had into choosing- even inventing- names for their children. I remember her dismay about a baby girl one family named Mikel- pronounced Michael- and the boy another couple named Rope. The second was the son of a small-time rodeo cowboy, so the unusual name suited; and ironically, years later one of my cousins married the girl named Mikel, who by then pronounced her name Mick-Elle, likely having discovered the difficulties of a strongly gendered name in that relentlessly judgmental town.
Early childhood is such an intense time of learning and growing. Perhaps there is something in the chemical make up of the brain of a child that can lock in certain memories, while making the rest of life lived as a child seem a misty haze. Such is the case of my time spent with Aunt Roxie and Uncle Preston- who must be mentioned with the same amount of tender remembrance, and who is still living- I hope for a long time to come. Uncle Preston tortured me affectionately for years with silly jokes and games, and a particular antic he called the banana splits. I’ve long said my flexibility in gymnastics was due to this. The scent of the interior of their big red Ford pickup truck is forever locked in my mind, as is the unpleasant (to me) smell of the dog food in cans they fed to their dog, Lady. In my mind, I can still hear the sound of the light switches in their house, and the creak of the floors; I can still see the fabric of the long “Davenport” I slept on; and the row of gorgeous bearded iris Aunt Roxie planted on the north side of the garage. I can still feel the late afternoon heat and breeze that came through the bathroom window and hear the birds outside, and feel Aunt Roxie’s fingertips roaming my scalp in search of ticks after we returned from cutting firewood in the mountains.
I’ve always remained close with Aunt Roxie and Uncle Preston, despite the differences we have in religious and political beliefs. We’ve just never much discussed these topics, and while they could be elephants in the room, I think we tried not to let them be. This is not a tactic I’ve used with other family members, to who I’m closer in age, but with Roxie and Preston I’ve simply followed their lead of love and not wanted to be harmed by toxicity encroaching from the world around. I always admired Roxie and Preston’s love for each other, and for their extended family. They were two people in love with each other who lived lives of expressing outward love.
The week before Christmas I felt a strong urge to call and talk to Roxie and Preston, so I did. We had a wonderful phone conversation for nearly two hours. They recounted how they’d spent much of their time during months and months of Covid life: going for drives. The lived near several mountain ranges and enjoyed driving through them to watch the seasons change. They told me of one recent day wanting to go for a drive but also needing to get groceries, so they drove two and a half hours over a mountain pass, bought groceries, and drove home again. I said next time they needed to shop, just keep on driving: my own town is just another hour down the road. At this point in her life, after serious health issues the past few years, Aunt Roxie was no longer behind the wheel. But my memory of her will always stay: in a car, steady hands, gaze affixed, smiling and speeding down the highway of life.
Post Script: When my Uncle Tom, Roxie’s youngest brother, delivered her eulogy, he shared some of the same general memories of her driving fast and mothering “all.” I’d already begun writing my memories of her here, but decided not to change anything. Parts of Aunt Roxie could be defined by these anecdotes, though there was a lot more complexity to her and her life, perhaps topics to explore in future writing.
