Meta and Loren Thorndyke lived on a ranch of approximately 140 acres in the hills of Cayucos, California. Those beautiful rolling hills were always covered with three things: the delicious smell of sage and anise, bellowing brown Swiss steers and people. Ours was a large family and Aunt Meta and Uncle Loren’s ranch was where everyone from every side of the family wanted to be. It’s where we brought our friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, husbands and wives, and eventually the next generation of children. It was the center of the family. If our grandparents had lived to ripe old ages, I imagine their ranch would have been where the family would have converged. Since John and Corina Walter had died fairly young leaving such a large brood, Aunt Meta had become the unofficial mother and grandmother for us all. She wasn’t the oldest daughter but that didn’t matter. Meta was everyone’s mother, no matter who they were. Once you walked in that back door, you were family.
Meta Thorndyke was the richest woman I have ever met. She
had no money so to speak. What she had was worth far more than dollars and
cents. What Meta had was priceless. My Aunt Meta was one of my mother’s older
sisters. There were fourteen children in all meaning older was usually measured
in months versus years. My grandmother, Corina Gada Walter died at only
forty-two years of age. My understanding is her death was caused from twisted
bowels from all those births so close together. Of course, in my family, the
stories themselves get more twisted each time they are told, so who knows what actually
killed her. Still, it makes for good conversation when we’re all together
trying to outdo one another with our inside knowledge of all the family’s
history.
Meta married in her twenties. His name was Jimmie McCauley
and he would remain the love of her life until the day she died. They were
married a short time by the standards of that era, however, long enough to
bring two daughters into this world. My cousins, Maureen and Mickey were only two
and three when their father died. He was a veteran of World War II and had
suffered physical trauma which eventually took his life. It was the late
forties. Being a single mother of two small girls back then cannot compare to
the young women on the same path today. Regardless of the circumstances of how
Meta ended up a single mother at such a young age, she lived in a small town
with limited opportunities. Her life could not have been easy nor people always kind.
She soon married a local rancher, Loren Thorndyke and moved her children into
his parent’s farmhouse in Cayucos, California. Cayucos, the city she was born
and raised in, the city she would die in, buried near her parents and siblings
in the local cemetery.
I asked my aunt one afternoon, while drinking coffee in that
same farmhouse kitchen, why she had married Uncle Loren. Had she known him her
whole life? Was she in love with him? Was she happy? I can’t recall all of her
answers but one, I will always remember. She talked about loving Jimmie
McCauley and missing him even then, as an old woman. She spoke of loving my
Uncle Loren but more like a brother and yes, she was happy. I thought about
that conversation for many years because it seemed sad to me, to lose the love
of your life and marry someone you loved like a brother. Then, when I was
older, I realized the aunt that I loved, adored really, had planted a very
important seed in my heart. It would stay there for many years, seemingly dead.
Until, at the very moment I needed it most, watered by my own bitter tears, it
would grow and produce the most beautiful answers to some of the most painful
questions. My aunt had taken the bitterness of life and used it to grow
something wonderful for herself and her daughters. Bitterness, much like compost,
can have a lot of death and rottenness about it. My aunt taught me the value of
not discarding life or its lessons, no matter how difficult it gets. She taught
me to keep turning the ugliness over, watering it with tears when necessary and
eventually, miraculously really, it turns into something wonderful and
unexpected. It’s rich and beautiful and organic with a smell of the earth that
goes deep into your very soul if you let it. My aunt taught me that while
drinking coffee at a kitchen table in an old farmhouse. I’m pretty sure she had
no idea what an incredible gift she had given me that day.
Life as I have known it for most of my adult, married life
has drastically changed over the last two years and all I can think about
lately is Meta Thorndyke. I have spent my life trying to do right. I have
worried about money and bills, my husband and children, being a good daughter,
sister, wife, friend and citizen. I have worried. A lot. Like almost every day,
all day, a lot. For the most part, all that worry has produced little to nothing of value. It has robbed me
of sleep, peace, joy and freedom. I can see that now. So, where do my memories
of Aunt Meta fit into all of this? That puzzle called my life is being pieced
together even now.
My life as a child and as an adult was and continues to be
tethered to Aunt Meta and her ranch. They are both gone now and yet they both
are more alive to me now than ever. There are framed photos scattered
throughout my home of my days on the ranch. Days filled with calves sucking our
fingers, lambs chasing us on the back patio, picking wild blackberries behind
the old creamery and swinging off a rope in the barn only to drop into the
sweet smelling hay below us. Nights filled with old mason jars full of tadpoles
we had scooped out of the old cement water troughs in the dark, hoping to see
them morph into big fat toads in the morning. Then there were the puppies and
kittens. The barn cats provided us with kittens on a regular basis and my Uncle
Loren’s sidekick, Pepina, would produce a few puppies now and then. After the
house was dark with every adult soundly sleeping, we kids would sneak out into
the quiet of the countryside night, skies filled with a million stars and head
to the old shed where all our soon to be contraband slept. It was thought they
would be safe from coyotes there, they were definitely not safe from marauding
children. We would each grab a favorite and scamper back into our beds where we
snuggled down into those wonderfully worn, handmade wool blankets and slept
with our furry treasures. Life was good.
Lest I forget, my aunt also had a monkey named Willa Mae.
She had been purchased by my cousin Mickey while at college. Mickey soon
realized a monkey and college were not a perfect fit so Willa Mae was sent to
the ranch. My Aunt Meta loved that monkey as did most of the rest of us. Willa
Mae wore diapers and little preemie sized baby dresses. She looked and smelled
like a monkey because she was a monkey but she was also the perfect size to
play baby with. It was never hard to find her. She was always in someone’s
arms, usually my Aunt Meta’s. But the times we kids could convince her to leave
the safety of Meta’s arms, convince meaning pleading with a piece of fruit, she
was ours if even for a short time, to dress up and push in a baby carriage. We
loved her and cried giant, hot tears when she was buried under the old fig tree
years later. I still miss that monkey.
My aunts love of nature, her amazing ability to grow
humongous gardens behind the old barn, her lack of care for fashion or finer
things, her gnarled hands from years of hard work, her love of family meaning
anyone who walked in her door, her love and care of animals, her outspokenness
on all subjects, her complete lack of political correctness coupled with her
love of all people helped make me who I am today.
I remember looking at my mother’s hands many times and
comparing them to my Aunt Meta’s. My mother was the baby of the family and one
of the best women I have ever met in my entire life. She shared many of the
same qualities that made her sister Meta so great. One difference however was
my mother was much more of a city girl than my aunt. My mother had her nails
and hair done weekly, she did hard work but of a different nature than Meta.
She was also outspoken and an animal and people lover. They were two versions
of the same person really. The city mouse and the country mouse. Often, as a child and as an adult, I would
hold my mother’s hand, stroking it with love, burning the image of her
manicured fingers and diamond rings into my memory. Even then, I knew I would
need to remember someday, her hands, when she was gone. It would aggravate her
though because I would always say, “Someday, I want hands that look just like
Aunt Meta’s.”
“Why in the world do you say that? My poor sister’s hands
are a mess from all that mans work she does. Why would you want hands like
that?”
“Because mom, Aunt Meta’s hands are beautiful. You can see
her life in them and I can see my life in them.”
It’s true. My life has been in my Aunt Meta’s hands all
these years. I have done what I thought I should do, what I needed to do, what
was right to do. But through it all, I have seen her hands reaching out to me,
drawing me in, offering me more, beckoning me to do what I was meant to do. So
now, finally, the journey begins. Again. I get no credit for the coming
changes. I have actually fought against what is coming. Thankfully, God, life
and probably my Aunt Meta have now forced the fork in the road upon me in such
a way that I can no longer ignore it. I get to choose which way to go, to the
left or to the right but choose I must and so I am choosing. I am choosing to
leave behind thirty-five years of fear, worry and doubt. I don’t need them
anymore. I am choosing to live the life I was meant to live.
My Aunt Meta was truly the richest person I have ever met.
She didn’t have money or famous friends but her house was always full of food
she raised and grew herself, fed to people from every walk of life who loved
her. She didn’t have new clothes or fancy fragrances. She wore pants and
blouses worn out from hard work and her perfume was an honest day’s sweat.
There were no new cars just my dear Uncle Loren’s old pickup truck, battered
and bruised from ranch life. She didn’t drive because she was blind from the
age of twenty-eight due to glaucoma. Life had often given her manure, scraps
and what looked to be worthlessness on more than one occasion and she took
every bit of it and turned it faithfully, often watered with tears, into a
deeply hued compost and grew the richest, most beautiful life ever.
