Aunt Lovetta

I was riding my bicycle home and was going downhill. My mind was wandering. It was dusk and as I picked up speed, bugs were slapping me in the face. I pursed my lips tight to keep them from getting in my mouth and I was reminded of my great-aunt Lovetta. I only met her once. I think she was my grandpa’s baby sister. 

It was the act of consciously trying to avoid swallowing a bug, that made me think of her. I remembered something that Aunt Lovetta said about riding a motorcycle. I have these fleeting, fuzzy… yet vivid memories of that one time we met. I don’t remember why she started talking about riding a motorcycle, but I remember the toothy grin on her face as she longingly spoke of the wind in her hair and the bugs in her teeth.

This left quite an impression on me as a child. When she raised her frail arms to rev the imaginary engine, she wasn’t with us in ma’s kitchen anymore. She spoke of the power of the bike, the freedom, the rebellion, and the sheer contentedness. 

I wasn’t expecting it. All the older women in my life were the grandmother, elementary-teacher type. I wanted to crawl inside her mind and read the stories she had to tell. But then, thrown into that magical moment of passionate memory and storytelling, she fondly recalled ‘the bugs in your teeth’, with a big grin, and then swept her hands across her face to represent the wind. 

Now, I don’t know if she did this to freak out a little kid and get a laugh. But it stuck with me. How someone could so warmly reflect on bugs in their teeth. And Aunt Lovetta had big, yellow teeth and long, wispy, thin reddish hair. I had never seen an older woman with long hair before Great-aunt Lovetta. I had never heard of anyone named Lovetta. We pronounced it Loveeta, like Velveeta cheese. 

I was enthralled by her. She was small, wrinkled, intimidating, fascinating, and confident. I remember sitting next to her in the car, watching her stare out the window as we drove her home, heading south through the flat, empty cotton land of the bootheel. 

I remember arriving at her house in the middle of nowhere. We’ve all seen these farmhouses in movies and on Courage the Cowardly Dog, smack in the middle of an open field with nothing else around. Images of the dustbowl come to mind. It was a rickety wood house with one tree, a rope swing, and a rusted car on cinder blocks. 

But I don’t really remember anything about being at Lovetta’s house that day. What I remember are the images I conjured up of flies in Lovetta’s nicotine and tar-stained teeth. So now I’m back in my grandma’s kitchen, where she shared her motorcycle memories. 

The hot summer sun is pouring in the window and all of us are working a puzzle as Aunt Lovetta sucks on her cigarette. She had been a smoker and to quit, she bought cigarettes, took them out of the packet, and just didn’t light ‘em. She would pop one in her mouth and go through all the motions of smoking a cigarette, except the thing was never lit. She would hold it between her fingers as if it were lit, hand casually cocked the way smokers do. She would talk with it in her mouth, the unlit cigarette hanging on her bottom lip, bobbing up and down. When the butt was chewed to mush, she would finally throw it out and grab another one. 

Aunt Lovetta was nonchalant. She didn’t pay the ‘cute’ kid no mind. Maybe that’s why the memory stuck. The only time she looked me in the eyes was to glorify the bugs in her teeth when she once roared down country roads on a motorcycle. 

Those are all my memories of her. I couldn’t think of anything else to say about Aunt Lovetta if I tried. I hadn’t thought about her for some time, but riding my bicycle and those bugs hitting my face brought it all back.