When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Sure You Have Some Sugar

Aunt Ella had a routine down when it came to her watering. 

She always started with the hanging Verbenas, and then moved on to the heavy pots of Hydrangeas, before hosing down the row of Zinnias she had planted along her front window. 

By the time I walked up, she was just turning on the hose.

“Here,” she said handing it to me. “Make sure you soak those Lantanas too. They just got transplanted this morning.”

“Aunt Ella, did you ever notice all your plants end in -as? 

Hydrangeas, 

Verbenas, 

Zinnias, 

and now Lantanas?”

“Of course I did,” she said. “They are the only ones that’ll grow here.”

“Who told you that?” I laughed.

“Nobody told me. I figured it out on my own. Just you try growing Geraniums and see what happens.”

Aunt Ella sat down in the lawn chair while I continued the watering.

“By the way," she said. "Have you picked those Evening Primrose roots yet? I’m barely fit for company these days. WillaDean dropped off a pound cake Wednesday morning, and I ‘bout scared the life out of that woman yelling at the door, and then yesterday Mr. Floyd stopped by for our weekly visit, and I couldn’t even entertain that man for more than ten minutes of him going on about his old knees before I’d shooed him out the door claiming a headache. At the rate I’m running people off, I’ll be dead in my chair a week and not a soul will know it.”

That was the other thing about Aunt Ella, she talked way too much about dying. Especially when it came to dying and nobody knowing it. It gave me the willies even thinking about it.

Mama Bessie said it was cause she was the baby of the family, and raised on way too many ghost stories and castor oil. Said they both just ran together right through her, and ever since then she thinks everything is going to kill her, but that never made much sense. You’d think if she was so worried about dying, the last thing she’d do is become an underwater mermaid, holding her breath for minutes at a time and swimming with sharks. 

But when I asked Aunt Ella if she was ever scared, she said,

"The only thing I have ever been scared of was 

not doing something over being too scared to do it."