What Broke Her Heart - Melody Cryns

The sunlight illuminates the colorful Beatles mugs sitting on the windowsill and the laminated tree branch, its roots intricate and tiny shining through. A box of Splenda sits on the counter next to a dirty plastic bowl and the bright-colored oranges rise above. There’s a small photo of me with my Aunt Anne Marie from 2005 when she visited us for a week and when I asked her how long she’d say, she said, “Honey I’m not on any timelines!” I remember laughing about that – she told me that once you hit 80, you could pretty much do whatever you wanted. So Aunt Annemarie stayed with us for a little over a week in 2005. She insisted that she had to go to church, so I took her to mass at the local Catholic church, St. Joseph’s, and she laughed for hours because as we were walking out of the church arm in arm, I said, “And the walls are still standing.”

Aunt Annemarie thought it was funny and chuckled about it even after I took her to my favorite coffee shop for coffee and a pastry (she said she always had coffee and pastry after mass, that’s just the way it was – but no meat usually). She told me stories about my Dad’s family that I didn’t even know because Dad was so much younger than his siblings and my uncles are both gone now. I drove Aunt Annemarie down to Monterey where I got to meet two of my first cousins – it’s sad that we aren’t closer – I have 26 cousins and I don’t even know them all. They’re all over the United States. Most of them remember me better than I remember them and many of them are older than me. Then I took Aunt Annemarie to my good friends’ home for a party – Floyd and Claire. Floyd’s older sister is about the same age as my Aunt, so everyone got along famously and she did her best to boogie down although her back was a little bent and it was hard for her to dance – but she loved the music.

Now my dad says that Aunt Annemarie has a little bit of dementia – she talks out loud to her husband of over 50 years Dick all the time. I could feel and hear her sadness because when Aunt Annemarie came to visit, it had only been a year or so since Uncle Dick had passed away and she missed him…after 50 years of being together, how could she not? They bickered at each other a lot but they loved each other so much.

Right next to the picture of me and my aunt, there’s a pink card that says, “For my friend” and I remember that it’s a valentine’s day card that my friend Phoenix sent me because I told her I despised Valentine’s Day and refused to celebrate it this year. She sent it to cheer me up.

No one sent me an Easter card this year, but that’s okay.