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quarters of an hour later, Aunt Celin said
that if I needed further relief to let her know in time and we would get
off the car and take the next one that came along. There was
no recurrence and the rest of the
trip was comparatively uneventful.
One summer an epidemic of whooping cough besieged our house
and I managed to escape it and spent several weeks at my grandmother's.
My cousins Henry and Celina Robbins were also staying there because
their parents had gone to Europe. A nurse, fresh from Ireland, had been
provided to help Aunt Celin with the children.
She had a great mop of red hair, matted and dis-orderly and she kept
scratching at it. Aunt Celin got suspicious, investigated and found it
was infested with lice. This was a dreadful blow to my very
proper grandmother who felt that having vermin in
one's house was disgraceful. She cancelled all her
engagements, shut herself in her room and refused to see anyone, while
poor Aunt Celin took the nurse into the laundry
to scrub her head with strong soap. There were two new maids
in the house and they stood by horrified, wringing their hands
and accompanying each of Aunt Celin's scrubs with a synchro-nized groan.
They too felt the ignominy of the situation and threatened to leave.
They had never worked in an infested house, they
said, and had no intention of ever doing so.
Somehow Aunt Celin, between scrubs and rinses, managed to smooth
things over, and in a few days life was back to normal,
the nurse had been forgiven and my grandmother had come out
of retirement.
The two new maids remained in my grandmother's employ for many
years. They were "Holy Katy" and her sister Honor. Both Katy and Honor
were in constant communication with the spirits. |
