The Little Egg Girl

In my first memory of Aunt Edith she was already old. All the children on South Church Street knew she was peculiar.

My older cousins from Chattanooga also laughed about Aunt Edith. She always fixed a lunch for them to take back when they came to visit. “It was only forty miles away” we would laugh together when we got older. And “Remember when she fixed fried chicken leg biscuits–with the bone still in it?” The lunch was always in a cardboard shoebox and we never knew what to expect.

In the summers about 9 o’clock every morning Aunt Edith drove her boxy black Ford three houses up the street, turned in our driveway, drove to the back, parked by the crepe myrtle trees and came in our back door. She usually wore a tailored suit with a lavender blouse (slightly dirty), a brooch, and always hat and gloves. She came up the back steps, opened the screen door without knocking and sat down at the kitchen table. She greeted us as we wandered in and out of the kitchen. She never stayed long.

Her timing was different from anyone I have ever known. We called it “Aunt Edith time.”

“Edith, the stores don’t open for another 30 minutes,” Mother would sometimes say.

“Well, I don’t want to be late.”

Or, she would clutch her purse, get up and leave the Woman’s Club program ten minutes before it was over. “I want to get home before it is too late.”

I wish I had asked her, “Too late for what?” She lived alone in the big white house down the street.

Most summer afternoons I stopped by Aunt Edith’s on my way to or from James Butler James’ house where the gang gathered to play softball. Usually Aunt Edith was sitting in one of the swings on her front porch, rocking and fanning. Sometimes I would get in the swing at the other end of the porch and swing as high as I could, almost touching the wisteria vine that grew from a white trellis and shaded the porch. Sometimes I would hear the thud-thud of the dull ice pick and she would bring me cold, homemade lemonade. It was a treat when she brought me a white sack filled with sugary corn candy (my favorite) from Woolworth’s 5&10 cent store. She would let me eat it all right then–even if it was almost supper time.

On South Church Street everyone was proud of their eccentric relatives. We all had them. But the eccentricities that endeared Aunt Edith to us became more pronounced as she aged. She began more and more to talk to herself and hallucinate. “There go those derisions and cat calls again,” she would suddenly scream out as we visited quietly on the porch.

I went away to college and lost daily contact with Aunt Edith. I always meant to stop by on college breaks but the visits became fewer and fewer. Aunt Edith however, continued to write. Every month I received a flowery greeting card with $5 inside. She told her friends she was helping to pay for my college education.

I married and moved away. One day the call came that she had died.

Entering Aunt Edith’s home with the cousins after her death was like entering Ali Baba’s Cave. Through the years she had crammed objects into every room. There was a mahogany antique desk. Opening a drawer a roach, shiny and black, skittered away. We saw a broken treadle sewing machine held together with baling twine–an antique china cabinet with mouse nibblings. There were piles and bolts of material everywhere-.on chairs—under sofas. Money was stuffed in the toes of the shoes in her closet.. But my sister found the real treasure–letters about the little egg girl.

On a shelf in the bedroom closet, was a shoe box with eight letters inside.

We opened an envelope, browned with age. A vermilion stamp showing George Washington in profile and costing 2¢ was postmarked 1907. The letters were addressed simply to Edith Gilmore, Shelbyville, Tennessee. From snippets of these letters we pieced the story together.

As a young girl Aunt Edith gathered eggs from the family chickens to sell to a local retailer. This egg money was hers to spend as she wished. Later we found the egg crate, a four layer wooden box with a square wooden handle. Each layer of the box had corrugated compartments for 24 eggs.

One day, on impulse she must have written her name and address on one of the eggs and added “Please Write.” The egg ended up in Atlanta in the hands of a gracious Victorian lady who, encouraged by her husband, followed up “the call to write.” Thus began a relationship between a dying, lonely woman and a sweet, little girl, eager to learn more about the world. From the letters she received we surmised that Aunt Edith wrote of learning to crochet and making a doily for her mother. The lady wrote of taking a Grand Tour of Europe aboard an ocean liner and seeing the Pyramids.

We could not tell from the letters whether the dying woman and Aunt Edith ever actually met. The final letter was from the woman’s husband telling of her death and saying she always looked forward to hearing from her little egg girl.

As children we laughed at Aunt Edith and accepted her as a natural part of our daily lives. We never thought of her as anyone but dear, crazy old Aunt Edith.

But she must have been remembering the girl she once was because, my sister said that the last thing she said as she lay dying was, “Did I get any mail today?”