Aunt Anna was my Grandma Britt's sister, very close in age but different in nearly every other way.  While my grandparents lived a very frugal life, to be sure, Aunt Anna's life was primitive by comparison.  Grandma Britt gave birth to 12 children, but as much as Aunt Anna longed to be a mother she and Uncle Tean were never so blessed.

 

Mama tells me that Aunt Anna used to beg her sister Hazel (my Grandma Britt) to give her one of her "young-uns" to raise, since she had so many and Anna none.  I'm sure it was mostly in jest, but perhaps there was a bit of secret desire that Hazel might do just that.  My grandma, as much as she loved her sister Anna, adored each one of her children even more and would never have given any of them away.

Aunt Anna was married to Uncle Tean, several years her senior, and I'm hard-pressed to conjure up a picture of either of them in my mind's eye.  I don't remember exactly what they looked like, but I do remember vividly the way they looked each time we visited.  Uncle Tean was bent, lean and sinewy, leathery-tanned skin from so many years working under the hot North Carolina sun, always wearing a dirty work shirt under his faded denim overalls and a wide-brimmed hat.  Sometimes he'd be out in the fields, working his tobacco crop with a team of draft horses like a pioneer might have a century before him.

Aunt Anna would nearly always be found in her garden, wearing a long stained cotton dress, worn thread-bare in spots.  I remember being shocked to see her one day in what must have been a pair of her husband's work pants, but mostly she wore those dresses.  A big tattered-edge straw hat would be on her head covering her tightly-bunned hair beneath, shielding her sun-browned lined face as she hoed the red dirt in her huge vegetable garden.

 

We'd often escape the broiling sun and "set a spell" on Aunt Anna's back porch to visit.  She loved to draw us some water from the well you see here, lowering a bucket down the cool dark hole and then pulling it up dripping with fresh, cold water.  She kept a well-worn ladle hanging there, and we'd drink the water straight from that ladle, an experience that was amazing for us kids.

Occasionally, we'd go inside for a visit or a homemade cookie or piece of bread.  Dark inside, it took a minute for our eyes to adjust from the harsh summer sunlight.  Her tiny rickety house had unlevel scraped wooden floors covered by equally-worn rugs, so worn that in spots the warp and woof threads showed through.  Her kitchen table had a peeled-paint finish from years and years of use...I suspect it was probably old before she even got it.  She had a few mismatched wooden chairs of many varieties, colors, and stages of ricketiness.  Aunt Anna was the original "shabby chic" decorator, for sure!

And there was stuff, lots of it, crammed on every shelf and making the tiny cabin feel even tinier.  Three rooms...a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room.  No bathroom, of course, but an outhouse out by the garden.  They did have electricity and a small ancient black-and-white television, but no running water inside. 

As a child and teenager, it was hard to even take it all in, and my memories are mostly vague impressions.  But I do distinctly remember that at least one of the walls in the kitchen had yellowed newspaper on it.  Mama says poor folks often did that to seal the cracks between the warped boards and to help keep some of the wind out.  Aunt Anna's house was like a living museum, and how I wish now I'd taken a lot more photos and paid a lot more attention.

These days I am attracted to old homeplaces like this one and there's nothing I love more than a timeworn cabin.  I wonder if my early visits to Aunt Anna's home instilled that fascination in me.  But I'm so thankful that at least my teenage self did take these couple of photos that trigger such fond special memories of visits to some very unique kinfolk.

I asked Mama the other day what memories she had of Aunt Anna and why they lived like they did.  She said they were just very, very poor and barely eked out a living off their few acres, raising nearly all their food and just enough tobacco to get them through until the next growing season.  They barely were able to survive themselves...perhaps that's why God never blessed them with extra mouths to feed.

One peculiar thing Mama told me about Aunt Anna and Uncle Tean...as seemingly oblivious to what others thought about their way of life, Uncle Tean was always adamant that Anna's hair would never be gray.  So as she got older, she used to put black shoe polish on her hair to hide the inevitable!

Both Tean and Anna are gone now.  I don't remember when or how Uncle Tean died, but Aunt Anna spent her final several years in a nursing home, suffering from Alzheimer's disease and completely unaware of any memories of her past life and her people.  I can't help but think that all those years she lived such a harsh life, but in her old age she when finally had air-conditioning and a few creature comforts, she wasn't able to enjoy them.

Wonderful memories are found in so many places....

....even down a red, dusty lane.