My Aunt Ruth

Last week I wrote about SHAME, a painful consciousness of being bad, wrong, and less than because of doing bad, wrong things or having them done to you.

Shame’s remedy is GRACE, being shown favor you don’t deserve. The question is, can you feel grace like you can shame? How does it manifest? Let me tell you about my Aunt Ruth.

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I always knew that if my parents died, I would go to live with Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac. I don’t remember when I was told this legal fact, but I thought it was a great idea because Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac had two kids, Macky and Donna. Donna was just my age and lived within an hour of my Memau’s farm in Virginia, the best place in the world. Besides, the real possibility of my parents’ death never occurred to me while ensconced in my cozy childhood.

Not even in March 1964 when I was in fourth grade and my mom had a near fatal car accident that made the frontpage of The Schenectady Gazette, “Woman Hit by bus.” An impatient bus driver had rushed a red light, hit my mom’s two-ton, black Ford station wagon broadside and launched her barely one-hundred-pound body out of the car, across four lanes of traffic, and onto a snowbank the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

That summer my mom was still recovering, so I spent a month in Virginia. Two weeks at the farm with my mom and Memau, and two weeks at Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac’s.

As Aunt Ruth drove Donna and I up the steep driveway that plateaued at their modest three-bedroom ranch, I recalled an earlier visit while she and Uncle Mack were building their first house. The contractor had cut down several giant oaks atop the ridge, and Donna and I had walked their long, straight trunks like balance beams.

During my 1964 visit, the heat was stifling, and Donna and I often retreated to the cool basement that still smelled like fresh concrete. To one side of the stairs was an old upright piano. Aunt Ruth could play by ear, yet there was a well-worn hymnal on the music shelf opened to “The Old Rugged Cross.” I had started piano lessons, and Donna and I plinked out the song. 

“On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame. And I love that old cross where the dearest and best for a world of lost sinners was slain.”

As a kid, I didn’t get the lyrics, but there was something plaintive in the melody that struck a chord. I wouldn’t have called Aunt Ruth or Uncle Mac religious. They went to church just like me and my family, but when Uncle Mac said the blessing before a meal, he spoke like a man thanking an old friend. The feeling of his prayer was nothing like my rote recitation, “God is great, and God is good…” Actually, for years, I thought it was God is gray not great. As a child I simply mouthed a long string of words. I might as well have been quoting Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.”  

One day that summer Donna and I crossed her street, and I met a neighbor family of sweaty, tow-headed kids playing tag.

The oldest girl yelled, “Hey, Donna.”

It wasn’t until I came closer that I realized she wasn’t wearing a blouse. I couldn’t take my eyes off the flesh mounded on her chest like small scoops of peach ice cream topped with a butterscotch kiss. 

The youngest boy, in nothing but dinghy underpants, touched his sister’s bare bosom and rolled away in laughter. “Ha, ha. You’re it!”

She swatted at his behind, “Get out of here, you brat,” then looked up at us. “Y’all wanna play tag?”

I didn’t know what I wanted. Maybe for somebody to put some clothes on. It was hot but come on!

If I knew that when I was only eleven, why didn’t I know it the summer after my freshman year in college when women nationwide were burning their bras and Aunt Ruth and Uncle Mac came to visit us in Schenectady? Standing in our kitchen, just me, my mom, and Aunt Ruth, my bare boobs jiggled beneath my T-shirt, and she said, “Don’t you think you better go upstairs and put on a brassiere?”

Even though the word straight had gained the connotation of uncool, Aunt Ruth remained as plumb as the tall oaks that remained atop the ridge where she and Uncle Mac had built their home.

Throughout the decades, Aunt Ruth never failed to send me a birthday card that landed exactly on the day I was born–even when my own life was shifting father and farther out of plumb.

Not only were her cards on time, they somehow contained the words that salved my sore spot of the moment, saying things like, You are beautiful when I was a brand-new mom trying to regain my shape and equilibrium.

You are unique and creative when I was home with toddlers feeling like I’d lost my professional identity and verve.

Words that told me, the world was a better place because of me. What a special niece I was. How lucky she was to have known and loved me. Me? The bucktoothed tomboy who lost her temper, the high school girl who lost her virginity, the foolish young bride who almost left her husband? The baby my birthparents couldn’t keep and put up for adoption?

When I first trusted Jesus and was flush with the joy and cleansing of rebirth, Aunt Ruth was one of the first people I told because, somehow, I was sure she’d understand. We’d never spoken about her faith. She’d never shared the four spiritual laws or tried to evangelize me. My parents didn’t die young, and I’d never officially lived with her, but she’d adopted me as surely as my parents had and tucked me deep into her heart as one of her many darlings. 

My mom once shared that when Uncle Mac met Aunt Ruth as a young woman he’d said, “I’ve met an angel and her name is Ruth.”

Ruth was the brown-haired beauty who’d sat by his bed and taught him to read again after he’d sustained a head injury during WWII. She was the one who’d cared for him again in old age until the former pilot took flight into glory.

I’m not saying there was anything extraordinary or supernatural about Aunt Ruth. No tulle wings or glowing halo. She grew up on a truck farm in Ohio, and most of her adult life worked as a secretary. She kept a tidy house, spoke the plain truth, and loved to laugh at a funny story. But remember the trend where people wore bracelets marked with the letters WWJD for what would Jesus do? All my life I could have worn one marked WWRD for What would Ruth do?

Now pushing a hundred, I just want my Aunt Ruth, and you dear readers, to know what I’m sure Uncle Mac meant.

Angels are radiant messengers of God’s grace.

Do you have an Aunt Ruth? I’m so glad I still do.

“So, I’ll cherish the old rugged cross,
till my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
and exchange it someday for a crown.”

Music and lyrics by George Bennard

Cover photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash

Copyright Ann C. Averill 2023