Southern Sisters Revisited

This post previously was made available to Southern Voice paid members, but if you missed it when I reposted it this past summer, here it is, in honor of Thanksgiving and family disasters everywhere:-)

They were a pair, those two. When we gather as a family to re-hash the funniest and best stories, my mom and her sister, Aunt Dot, get top billing.

They grew up during the Great Depression in the small North Carolina town of Belmont, just outside Charlotte. Two of six children, three boys and three girls, their father was a Baptist minister. Both girls were great beauties (more about that in a minute), and both left home in their twenties, got married and moved away.

Aunt Dot ended up “up North” - or at least that’s what the Maryland suburbs just outside Washington, DC seemed to us. My mom snagged a husband just a few miles northwest of Charlotte in another small town - Lincolnton - and that is where she stayed - except for rare journeys to see her other sister in Alabama, and of course, an occasional trip to see Aunt Dot.

Years and miles, however, did not dilute their sisterhood one bit. They spoke on the phone (“long distance” - it was a big deal) and wrote letters, sending snapshots back and forth. Aunt Dot’s divorce (the first in the family) rocked the foundations of the earth for a while, but then the dust settled. And on those few trips to Maryland, they would settle in at her kitchen table with cups of coffee - talking for days on end and waving us off to the museums and the monuments in DC with barely a glance.

And then Aunt Dot “came home” - well, moved back to North Carolina, and the visits became much more frequent. Children all grown and gone, they took to spending days together - either at Mom’s house, or at Aunt Dot’s lovely townhome in the mountains - still talking non-stop.

One of those marathons involved an extended Easter visit with Mom that spawned what we still call The Baked Ham Debacle.

They were spending the morning in the kitchen, ostensibly pulling together a big family lunch, but from what we could tell, it was nothing but coffee and chatter with an occasional glance toward whatever was boiling over or burning on the stove. Finally, lunch was served. Mom called my husband, Joe, into the kitchen to carve the ham (while she and Aunt Dot continued on with the running conversation that was now going on 70 years in length), only to be interrupted by him a few seconds later - holding up what looked like a burned, collapsed balloon of some sort.

“Helen - these hams taste a little better when you take the plastic wrapping off of them before you run them in the oven.”

Old age may have been making the sisters sweeter, but it was doing nothing for their culinary skills.

Case in point - Aunt Dot’s Thanksgiving trip down the mountain with her visiting son to spend a few days with all of us. They had already been in a local hotel for a couple of days when they came in my back door about twenty minutes before Thanksgiving lunch was ready to eat. Plopping down a big cooler in the middle of my kitchen floor, my cousin Buck turned to walk into the living room. Wide-eyed, my sister and I called after him, “Uh…what’s this?” "I dunno”, he said, calling back over his shoulder. “Something she made for you guys before we left to come down here. It’s been in the hotel with us since we got here.”

We raised the lid and leaned in to discover what had been a lime Jello congealed salad on the day they left home, but was now clearly gone past its prime. The thing was floating in about three inches of water (which once upon a time was ice), and the foil wrapping on the mold had let loose in a place or two, allowing a few mini marshmallows, a couple of Maraschino Cherries, and a chunk of pineapple to escape their gelatinous bonds and go for a swim.

My sister was just lifting it out of the cooler and turning to hide the thing behind my pots and pans, when we heard Aunt Dot come in the door. “Oh GOOD! You found my CONGEALED SALAD. It’s one of my specialties. Here, let me have it. Should I put it on the dessert table or on the buffet?”

What followed was a frenzy. We had to make the rounds - undetected - to all 23 family members - in order to whisper an urgent message in each ear: “Don’t touch the congealed salad!” There was no time for explanation beyond that. The line was forming.

In a wild postscript to this, about an hour after we finished eating, when we were all stretched out in the living room, drowsy from the feast, our neighbor, Bunny, came bounding in the door and grabbed a plate. “Hey y’all! Happy Thanksgiving! Wow this looks good. Oh MAN, congealed salad! My favorite!” And before we could stop him, he dove in. To our knowledge, he never got sick. Then again, he was prone to all kinds of ancient Asian specialty foods that would put most people in the hospital - so there is that.

And, finally, there was the matter of Aunt Dot’s deathbed confession. We had been called up the mountain. The message had been ominous. This was it. With Mama by her hospital bedside, holding her hand, Aunt Dot turned toward her with a sweet smile.

“Helen, we were the two prettiest girls in Belmont.”

“Oh, Dot, don’t say that.”

“Well, we WERE. I was the prettiest, and you were the second prettiest.”

As it turned out, it wasn’t really her deathbed, because shortly after our visit, one of the kids went to her townhouse and brought back her bottle of Southern Comfort. She rallied and lived another ten years.

Now, however, they are both gone - likely sitting somewhere up on a cloud with their cups of coffee and their eternal conversation. And when holidays roll around - especially Thanksgiving, I think of them and raise a glass. Here’s to the two prettiest girls in Belmont. Thanks for the memories.

Photo of my mother, the (ahem!) “second prettiest”, above.