C mon, you ve got to remember
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
On my birthday, I believe I told you the story of my Aunt Naomi going all the way from Kansas to California so that she could be present at my birth. "I was supposed to be going to help," she said with a chuckle, "and what did I know about having a baby? Not much." (Evidently, when she came back from California, she was now an experienced nurse maid because she took a job working for the Abe Heiser family when they had twins.)
I ran across a picture this week of me and my Aunt Naomi when I was just a baby. I think the photo must have been taken in California because she's standing in front of an unfamiliar house, holding a bundle of blankets with a cap on a tiny face peering out on the world. That was us — a smiling raven-haired young woman and a new little soul.
It was ironic that I should see the picture this week for the very first time because my Aunt Naomi died this week. Another chapter in our Ramona adventure closed.
It was a jolt for me to realize that in the Solomon and Leah Ehrhardt family, I am now, as their eldest grandchild, the oldest living of their immediate kin. There were only two children born to Solomon and Leah — my dad, Laurel and my aunt Naomi. My Aunt Verna, younger than Naomi and raised as her sister was actually a cousin, adopted by my grandparents. A little over a month ago Aunt Verna died. And now Naomi is gone, too.
To me, the most tragic of circumstances would be that when a chapter on life closes there would be very little recorded between the beginning and the end. Luckily, because we chose to trek back to Ramona, our memories with Aunt Naomi could almost fill a book.
My sister and I sat with our cousins last night around the table, recounting our recollections of Naomi's life. Steve remembered that his mother was an intrepid wallpaperer. "She was always wallpapering our bedroom," he said. "She couldn't paint because there were so many cracks in the plaster, but every couple of years she would paper."
Steve remembers the smell of wallpaper paste and how that clean freshness would permeate the room. In fact, he could smell it as soon as he hit the bottom of the stairs. "Remember how we'd race up the stairs all excited to see what she'd done?" Steve turns to his brother Joe. Joe shakes his head. "C'mon," Steve says, "You've got to remember! We did it together." Those two little boys would race part way up and then go back down and start up the stairs again — sometimes two or three times — just to delay the gratification of seeing what their mother had done to their little upstairs room.
The echo of his words, "C'mon, you've got to remember — we did it together," spun round in my head as I went to bed last night. How many things we've done with Naomi! We used to send UPS packages to her addressed to "the white house with black shutters that is two blocks west and one block north of the bank in Ramona." (This was before Ramona got street names and numbers.) She'd get the boxes, too!
I didn't know how good she was at wallpapering when we got the Ramona House. She spent hours with a squirt bottle and a scrapper, though, helping us take wallpaper OFF those old walls so that we could repair the cracks and put another layer of paper back ON. We'd work hard all day reclaiming our little house on Main Street and then go back to her house for mashed potatoes (the whitest, fluffiest ever) and gravy, fried chicken, and cherry pie. She was the best cook!
It's another day in the country and today we have a slew of cherry pies to bake in Aunt Naomi's honor. We're going to serve cherry pie to relatives and friends after her memorial service. "Not to fret, Aunt Naomi, we'll always remember. We did it together!"
