(1) YOUR MOTHER HELD AUNT MIMMY IN HER LAP.

Monday, June 10, 1935

     Greetings, dear diary.  Right now you are only a notebook full of blank pages, but get ready to be full of my secrets.  I hope you won’t get claustrophobia when I shove you way, w-a-a-y under my mattress.  There is a certain person in this house who would love to get her hands on you.  Attention Janeth: Snoopers never read good of themselves.

     Janeth is my 10 year old sister.  I am 13, and my hobbies are 1st reading, 2nd going to the movies, and 3rd golf.  My brother is 19, and he doesn’t like me.  Don’t ask me why.  I never tattle on him when he’s mean to me because he gets punished enough by our father.

     I have a darling beautiful mother named Ernestine who is around 40 years old. She used to be an opera singer and we didn’t see much of her in those days. We heard her more than we saw her.  She would turn the water on in the bathroom and practice her scales. I can remember being allowed to stay up late when she sang on the radio. 

     My father David is 13 years older than my mother and has wavy hair that was straight until he got maleria in the Spanish American war.  He is a very strict man, especially with my brother.  I usually didn’t know why my brother was getting punished except when he wet the bed.  I could hear him getting the razor strap almost every morning.  When he got to be 12 and still wet the bed, my father tried a new punishment.  He made Dick stand in the front hall for hours with his wet sheets hanging over his head.  When Vaughan called the family to dinner, he still had to stand there.  I went down the back stairs and through the kitchen to get to the dining-room.  I felt so sorry for him, I didn’t want to walk past him. 
     You're probably wondering who Vaughan is.  When my Aunt Mimmy got sick with cancer, mother hired Vaughan to help take care of her.  She wore a white uniform and cooked wonderful meals, but my aunt hardly touched the food on her tray..  I never saw her up and around.  All I knew was, she didn’t like noise.  Every morning she would call me into her room and promise Janeth and I a nickel if we’d try not to shout in the back yard.  I’m afraid we often forgot, but she gave us the nickel anyway. 

     No one told me Aunt Mimmy was dying.  To me, she was just a white face on a white pillow.   Then one day she dissapeared.  When I was older, Vaughan described the way she died.     

     “I’ll never forget seeing your mother holding Aunt Mimmy in her lap in the rocking chair.  She had lost so much weight, it was easy to lift her out of bed.  Mother rocked her and sang to her in a soft voice, and after a while Aunt Mimmy just stopped breathing.  She went very peacefully.”

     That was the end of the nickels, of course.