Aunt LaLa is 93 years-old. She tells me that my daughter is adorable, my son so handsome, as they are with me on this rare visit. Her words fall on me, yet I don’t feel like a fifty-something mother. I feel like a sixteen-year-old girl next to her; her smile wraps around me, her chatty voice still so comforting after all these years. The pink-painted bedroom, so familiar, yet, so strange. The faded, white-painted furniture and silk flowers in a vase, greet me like old friends.

As a child, I wondered, “Why on earth are there fake flowers in the house, when the yard offers so many pickings?”

Back then, the yard was filled with living, powerful zinnias, roaring dandelions, swaying black-eyed susans, buttery buttercups, trumpeting honeysuckles, peeping blue violets, the uplifting, blue flowers of the tall, chicory stalks, long, wild grass, soft yellow forsythia, dainty, doll-cups of lily-of-the-valley, purple hydrangeas, laughing-blue dayflowers, brilliant marigolds, and the deep, dark, secretive green of the pine trees that rule on the top of a stone wall.

“Jeanne, you’re an old lady!” jokes Aunt LaLa. She smiles at my children, smiles at me, chuckles a soft chuckle.

I laugh and hug her and tell her she is wonderful.