AUNT IDA
A recollection by
Joseph A. Citro
Shortly after I was born on January
5, 1948,
my parents took me home from Rutland Hospital to 33 Pleasant Street in Ludlow, Vermont.
For a number of years I lived there with my mother,
my father, and my Aunt Ida.
Aunt Ida wasn’t my aunt in any blood sense. She was
my aunt in an old-fashioned way. Years ago it was proper for young people to address
older women who were close to the family as “aunt”.
But such distinctions made no difference to the
young me. I had lots of aunts, but she was the only one who lived in my house.
Later, when I had acquired some measure of
consciousness, I discovered a secret. I realized it was not our house at all;
it was hers. Aunt Ida was also our landlady. And, as time passed, there were
still more secrets to discover about her.
Every memory of her is that she was old. She was in
her seventies when I was born, so for me she played more the role of grandmother
than aunt. My earliest memories are that we were all one family. In my
developing brain, this was the arrangement: she had a house, and we had a house,
and the two houses were connected by a single door leading from our dining room
to her living room. Generally it was kept closed, but often used. We passed
back and forth without knocking.
I can remember opening the door slightly and peeking
in. She’s be sitting in her padded rocking chair by the window, feet on a
stool, her rectangular magnifying glass poised above the newspaper, a letter,
or the Bible.
She was likely to see me, smile, and invite me to
the couch where we’d sit side by side while she read to me. Mostly I remember
the Thornton W. Burgess books with the wonderful illustrations by Harrison Cady.
On sunny days I’d often join her on the porch—the
piazza, she’d call it. We’d sit in wooden high-backed rocking chairs while she
taught me the names of the various birds that seemed so plentiful in those
days. I remember bluebirds in particular; to me they looked like miscolored
robins.
She kept flower gardens, a gigantic vegetable
garden, and even a pear tree.
In the three years before my brother Rodney was
born, I spent a lot of time with Aunt Ida.
Sometimes I’d wait on the porch for her. She never
drove nor had a car. Instead she’s come walking home from the grocery store,
the Baptist church, or the Bible school classes she taught.
It was a puzzle to me why we didn’t all go to the
same church, but that, along with so many other things, seemed perfectly normal
in those years.
Later, after my parents bought our own house, we
continued to see Aunt Ida very regularly. My father and I would go to help her
with the yard work or to manage the snow, which—like flowers and birds—seemed
more plentiful back then. As she got older still, she’d come to stay with us during
the Vermont winters that she had endured on her own for
so many years.
I have no bad memories of Aunt Ida. She never forgot
my birthdays and always had something under the tree for me each Christmas. In
my mind she remains the quintessential sweet little old lady. I remember her
caring for my brother and me when our parents were away. I remember peanut
butter and homemade jelly sandwiches at her round kitchen table, looking out toward
the backyard and the colorful bursts of her flower garden. I remember the dessert
she made, a homemade confection something like ice cream taken from the freezer
in ice cube trays.
She would then do the dishes in a metal dish pan
using bits of recycled (of course we never used that term in those days) hand
and bath soap broken up in a sealed metal basket with a handle. It was called a
“soap saver”, I think. She’d swish it around in the dishwater summoning bubbles
that billowed from the top of the pan. Quite different from the way things were
done in our division where we had liquid dish soap and a double sink.
She had been single all her life. Those who didn’t
call her Aunt Ida addressed her as Miss Fuller. Someone told me that she had
been in love and had planned to marry a man who was killed in the First World
War. So she never married. Part of the story was that he had been a fighter pilot.
I never asked her about this and have never learned the truth. I wouldn’t call
it a secret, really, but if it were true she never talked about it.
Above all, she was a Vermonter through and through.
She was born on a farm right there in Ludlow in 1874. She went to school
with Calvin Coolidge. She was a teacher until 1905 (and was still teaching when
I knew her, politely, often humorously correcting my grammar. “You ought to
really know grammar,” she joked before giving me the scoop on split
infinitives.
From 1905 until she retired in 1939 she worked as a
legal secretary for John G. Sargent, who was Attorney General in the Coolidge
Administration. She was a Republican. We all were in those days.
She was an independent, spirited, highly principled
woman. Some might say she was ahead of her time, but she wouldn’t have gone
along with that.
She never touched coffee or tea, always sipped a cup
of hot water with her meals. She never raised her voice nor appeared to be
angry or confused about anything. She could quote the Bible but didn’t, yet she
lived and taught the principles of Jesus. “He’s as much alive now as he ever
was,” she once told me.
Aunt Ida inadvertently achieved a modest degree of
fame in her lifetime. I remember she was asked to go on network television,
which was a really big deal in those days.
The producers for I’ve Got a Secret contacted her, inviting her to appear live with Garry Moore.
She emphatically refused (but politely, though sternly, I imagine). It is not
that she didn’t want her secret known. Rather, it was because she found out the
show was sponsored by a tobacco company. (Perhaps needless to add, Aunt Ida
never smoked nor owned a television).
When age made living alone impossible, Aunt Ida relocated
to the home of her niece Hazel in West Brattleboro. She died in 1975 while I
was living in Italy. She was one hundred years
old.
But Aunt Ida didn’t take her secret to the grave. In
fact, she is quite well known in certain circles to this day.
Ida May Fuller—Aunt Ida—was the first person in the
United Stated to collect Social Security. The check, number 00-000-001, was
issued to her on January 31, 1940. The amount: $22.54.
That was eight whole years before I met her.
Burlington VT
February 10, 2012.
