Article archive / October 2023
Originally published: . Volume 14, No. 10. Source pages: 2.
Aunt Lee by J. Nelson
My Aunt Lee turned 105 last month.
In 2018 we celebrated her 100th birthday, joining the multitudes of relatives and friends that gathered at her home on Sibley Lake in Natchitoches, where she lived by herself (Uncle Bill died some years ago), surrounded by books (she retired from teaching and from her job as Librarian at Northwestern) and walls of photos of her five children, grandchildren and greats.
She's watched the disappearance of outhouses, pedal operated sewing machines, and party-lines. She's put away her black & white television, manual typewriter, and encyclopedias. She lived through the Great Depression and WWII, witnessed a cure for polio, and watched the moon landing.
Like everyone else, her life has not been without its tragedies. When Lee was eight years old, her father died in an accident, described in the headline in a 1926 issue of the Shreveport Times – "Auto Plunges from Highway, Man Drowned." Coushatta, Dec.19 (Special).– Charles Hunter, 27 years old, of Creighton, was drowned at 6 o'clock Sunday night, his wife was severely bruised and shaken and the 14 months old baby was lacerated about the head, when the automobile in which they were riding plunged over an embankment two miles from of Creighton, pinning Hunter beneath the car which landed in a ditch filled with water. He was drowned before aid could be summoned. The wife and baby escaped death by being thrown free from the car as it plunged over the embankment.
Aunt Lee has always expressed her emotions freely, including about the accident, and how her father, Charlie, was playing chicken with a friend, Jeter Adams, on Highway 1 south of Shreveport, when one of them miscalculated and turned stupidity into tragedy, making a widow of my grandmother, Julia, and giving my mother, the 14 month-old, a scar at her hairline to remember her father.
Lee details of the stories of a young widow with three little girls, coping with losses and change, embraced by the close-knit relationships of a rural, farming community, of men who worked long days in the fields and women who sat in a quitting circle or shelling peas together on the front porch. And at all times, shared a connection to others at church on Sunday mornings.
In his Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression, author Johann Hari shows that mental illness is social. "You need to have a community," he writes. He quotes the World Health Organization who says, "…the presence or absence of mental health is above all a social indicator…". The rise in suicide and mental illness, Hari writes, is not because we need more pills, but because we are suffering from a "… social and spiritual imbalance in how we live."
She thinks nothing about her age, she said, or death for that matter. I asked Aunt Lee once if she was afraid of dying, and she said, "I don't give it a second thought."
Her key to a long life is living it in "a wholesome way." She seems to have lived a life of balance, with equal measures of faith, family, community and her meaningful contributions to it all.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.