ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701200006
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: new river journal
SOURCE: ELIZABETH OBENSHAIN
It's curious how those we are closest to can be the people who surprise us the most.
In the daily intimacy of family life, we forget or overlook our spouse's humor, a cousin's artistic flair or an aunt's courage.
During the holidays, as 30 of us gathered at our family homeplace, we shared the nostalgic chore of sorting through stacks of family photos and clippings saved by our aunts, all but one of whom are now gone.
These aunts all had some pack rat in their veins. There they were in photos from the '50s, in their white gloves and summer hats, their "Queen Elizabeth pocketbooks" on their arms as they waved goodbye at the start of a cruise. Here they were smiling at the camera in the '60s as they carved the Christmas turkey in the big country kitchen.
Those familiar faces, frozen in youthful moments and later captured as age marked lines and character around their eyes, stared back at us.
One pile of memorabilia, however, held a surprise.
Aunt Millie, the queen bee of the family whose long, braided white hair was worn in a coronet on her head, had packed away her dog tag and military patches from World War II among her photographs and papers.
She had left the proper, orderly halls of Roanoke's Lewis-Gale Hospital to become a front-line nurse, serving with a unit from the University of Virginia Medical School. Their evacuation hospital worked just behind the front lines as American soldiers fought desperately across Africa and up the coast of Italy. She escaped death by only a boat's distance when the supply ship following her own transport across the Mediterranean was sunk by the enemy.
There in her stack was the original of a picture all of us in the family knew and treasured: Aunt Millie reaching out her hand to shake hands with Winston Churchill as he toured the front lines during World War II. Scribbled on the back was her name and notes about the meeting.
She stood there in her simple military uniform, a contrast to the elegant woman I remember passing her days keeping house and tending the flower garden.
Rifling further through the pile, I came upon a picture none of us remembered: there was Aunt Millie, this time in a fashionable suit, her hair in its customary coronet, gathered with a small group gathered around a very important looking man in a long white robe.
I looked and looked again.
"My, gosh," I said to my cousin with a laugh. "Here's Aunt Millie and the pope!"
We passed the picture around, examined it and figured out that my aunt's medical unit must have had a reunion in Italy where they had been welcomed by Pope Pius XII.
We laughed in sheer surprise at how Aunt Millie had gotten around.
From a farm in a small Virginia crossroads of about 11, she had gone on to participate in world-changing events and to meet people the rest of us only see in news clips.
This slender woman, whom I remember as soft spoken, always gracious, never mentioned World War II. At first, I thought I had simply missed out on hearing her "war stories" because I was the "baby" of the family and had come along too late.
Other family members, however, confirmed that she never talked of those days, of what she endured in the field hospital behind the front lines.
One aunt remembered her once describing operating for 24 hours straight during a battle while standing in knee-deep mud as the medical teams frantically patched and sawed and mended lives.
It was the lives they couldn't mend that weighed most on her, according to one cousin. As a nurse, she had to walk past the dying in the field hospital in search of those who had a chance to be saved.
Growing up, I never thought to ask Aunt Millie about courage and hard choices and surviving in the face of tragedy. Only larger-than-life heroes on the national news are supposed to have such answers.
Yet the heroes best able to teach us about courage and other lessons of life are often right there at home if we'll simply ask them and then listen.
LENGTH: Medium: 76 linesby CNB