I honestly wish my mother would tell me more stories about her Aunt, but the most I can recall was that Mom used to work summertimes in the boarding house. (Which in Mississippi had to be blistering hot, stripping beds and doing laundry and running up and down the stairs, so possibly childhood trauma makes my Mom refuse to recall too much.) I don't think Aunt Rina ever married, but -- as even my grandmother admitted once -- it wasn't like Aunt Rina didn't have at least two 'beau' at any given time, often one on each arm.
Plus, she also had chairs that came with the house, carved somewhere we have-no-idea -- tall backed wooden dining chairs, with faces sort of like green men carved at the tops and just under the seat. (They were lined up in the front hall, and my mom's story is that she used to take the servant's stairs just to avoid the chairs, which seemed to be glaring at you, at night.) They look cool, but they're ridiculously uncomfortable, which was apparently the entire reason Aunt Rina kept them. She called them "guest chairs," since the idea was that no guest would stay for longer than five minutes if that was their only seating choice.
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Date: 29 Jan 2011 05:56 am (UTC)Plus, she also had chairs that came with the house, carved somewhere we have-no-idea -- tall backed wooden dining chairs, with faces sort of like green men carved at the tops and just under the seat. (They were lined up in the front hall, and my mom's story is that she used to take the servant's stairs just to avoid the chairs, which seemed to be glaring at you, at night.) They look cool, but they're ridiculously uncomfortable, which was apparently the entire reason Aunt Rina kept them. She called them "guest chairs," since the idea was that no guest would stay for longer than five minutes if that was their only seating choice.
That kind of humor seems to run in my family.