Aunt Lillian

Aunt Lillian was the second youngest of the children in my grandmother’s family and when I was first aware of her she was in China acting as a teacher for the children of the missionaries second by the church. I’m not sure how long she was there, whether it was longer than a single tour of duty.

On her return from China she taught in the school at Dayton (about 8 miles south and east of Gowrie) and while she was there she would often return to Gowrie on weekends. Often my father would drive to Dayton late on Friday afternoons and bring her to Gowrie — I can remember riding along for the drive and I can still sort of picture vaguely the house she roomed in in Dayton.

The last year she spent teaching was in Gowrie. She had the sixth grade the year I was in fifth grade. The following summer she was married to uncle Verner. I recall the wedding — at least the dinner that followed in the evening after the ceremony. The children were relegated to eating on the front porch — the adults occupied the dining room table, perhaps extended to handle the number of people present, by some makeshift extension into the parlor.

Uncle Verner was also an ordained pastor in the Lutheran church and he served first in Florida and later in Isanti, Minnesota. While they were in Florida they would make the trip back to Gowrie every other year. As I have written earlier I visited them in Isanti sometime in my youth — I can’t pinpoint the date. I think it was at Isanti that aunt Lillian died from Hodgkin’s disease or it may have been later when they were at a pastorate in Michigan (Iron Mountain?).

We children liked uncle Verner — he was an easy-going extrovert and surely had a way with children. I remember once when he took us on a walk, beginning at the little brown house, north to the M and St. L tracks, then west to the road bordering Gowrie on the west and thence back to the little brown house. This may have been even before his marriage to aunt Lillian.

On one of his periodic trips back to the Midwest from Florida, uncle Verner was giving a number of presentations, probably with respect to the home mission he was involved with in Florida. I think the congregation he served in Florida was supported by home missions. He needed someone to handle the slide projector he was using in one of his talks and he asked me to assist him. The talk was at one of the towns neighboring Gowrie, Boxholm, and we got back to Gowrie at the (to me) unearthly hour of 11 p.m.

Aunt Lillian was an individual of a rather slight, willowy build and of a pleasant demeanor and an easy way with people. Like her sisters (except for aunt Laurine) she wore her hair with a little bun at the back of her head. Like her sisters her blond hair had grayed early and was almost white at the time of her decease (late 40s or early 50s).

One facial expression characteristic of aunt Lillian sticks in my mind. Whenever there were the usual devotional reading and prayers after a meal or when the conversation turned to matters religious, there came on her face this look of solemn, almost implacable piety, with a slight pursing of the lips, a kind of intent expression, even almost manic, to the eyes and brows. It was an expression exhibited to a degree by all her siblings under such circumstances. It was as if they were worshiping not so much the content of the reading, but the actual form of it. Utmost respect was accorded every outward manifestation of various religious rites. The attitude would also be accompanied by a lowering of the eyelids with the gaze directed downward toward the hands, folded discreetly in the lap.

I wonder sometimes if I have a fixation, of disapproval, with the religiosity of my grandmother’s household and to a lesser degree of my parents’ home. Perhaps I am as unnatural and as biased as they were. Maybe it is primarily that I cannot tolerate being so closed up in mind that I cannot tolerate change or the evidence of the world as it can be seen. I trust that that is the case and I am not inhibited by a vagrancy of character that keeps me going where reading, observation and experience lead.

Over the years we have had some contact with aunt Lillian’s children. On some of our trips to the Midwest we have visited with Phoebe (the eldest) and her minister husband Arne and with Ted and Barbara. We last say the youngest, Luther, at the time of my mother’s funeral — that was also when I last saw uncle Verner.

Uncle Verner remarried after aunt Lillian’s death and lived out his retirement years in southern Minnesota. He is now deceased.