When It Rains It Pours

They say that into every life a little rain must fall. Those of you on the east coast who have been traveling around in these torrential rains know exactly what that means. It's been kind of nice, actually. Growing up, we spent our summers camping, and the sound of rain on the camper was always one of my favorite noises. When it pours like that, I can listen to the rain on my air conditioner, and it makes almost the same sound.
My life seems to be attracting all sorts of metaphorical rain too, though, these days. My aunt Jeanne passed away last week. It's hard to really mourn someone who lived to be 98, though. She clearly had a full life. She was my grandmother's sister, and their family came to the States from Quebec when they were children. I interviewed 2 of their other sisters for a college course I took on the Depression, and they told me stories about how they all lived together (there were nine of them) and whoever managed to get a job would pitch their earnings into a communal pot. The girls had only one pair of hose and one nice dress, so they would take turns going to mass. One would go to an early mass, come home and change clothes, and the next would put the dress on and so on.
Jeanne was my cousin Missy's grandmother, and when my grandmother died when I was 8, Missy offered to share hers with me. We stole her money for the paperboy once, for or our "secret club." The club was a treehouse we built, and the money went for one thing and one thing only--candy from the corner store. (Missy, of course, confessed, and we got in trouble.) Jeanne used words lke "bad lucky" (the opposite of lucky), and one year after she was already starting to go senile, she showed up on Christmas in a pair of bright purple polyester pants and a fuschia sweater. And every time she'd see you, whether or not she remembered who you were, she'd give you a big hug and say, "it's so nice to see you," as though you had just made her year. She was the last alive of her siblings, or friends, and outlived her husband by 20 years. She used to say, "It's not funny, you know, to be the last one left." And now she's back with them all. I hope she told them all how happy she was to see them.