Friday, March 19, 2010

My Great Aunt Andrea

I will always remember the image of my great grand aunt on my father's side. Her name was Andrea Garcia Valdez. My family used to visit her in the 40's when I was a small child and she died when I was 12 and she was about 104. The image that has stayed in my mind all this years is of her sitting in front of her huge wood stove in her kitchen..the kind you see depicted in Christmas cards. She still cooked and cleaned her house when I was a child. She wore her shoulder length hair in a little bun held together with wire hairpins, which she sometimes placed on the stove front fender to redo her knotted bun of hair.
She was a widow with three sons in their 40's still living in the property, but in small houses of their own. her only daughter, the youngest married several times and had two sons and a daughter in their teens. Sometimes she too lived on the property or with her mother between marriages, but her children were a troublesome lot most of the time, getting into trouble. Both she and her daughter died young and Aunt Andrea and her middle aged sons had to deal wityh the two young boys.
The youngest of the three brothers, married and moved to Mexico with his wife, but the other two remained single all their lives. They showed a lot of respect and help to their mother as she aged. She was their bank...with two little cloth bags in different colors hanging on the inside of the waist of her skirt. Before they went shopping for anything, they would as her for the money and she would go to that respective little bag and give that son his money.
Both uncles were always talking about current event happening in those years because they always read the newspapers daily. they also both spoiled me with little presents. It was actually with some fabric that one of them, Nieves, gave me that I made my first dress for myself when I was 13. It was a weird color material of little triangles in orange and pink, but I did like it very much.
After they died, I lost track of my young cousins for many years, but saw the wife of one of them in Fort Worth in 1992.

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