Sunbonnet Soliloquy

By Jewell Ellen Smith

The Periwinkle Lady

Title this vignette “Aunt Shug and Her Periwinkle Seeds.”

You know what a periwinkle is. It’s a common trailing plant with blue or white single flowers, often used in window boxes.

To know who Aunt Shug was, how she lived, and what she believed in, you must understand something of her background, something of her times.

Also, you must keep in mind that a little more than a generation ago there were no such things as social security, nursing homes, senior citizen centers, and what have you. Elderly people who could no longer maintain their own homes (for lack of strength or money, or both) simply “broke up housekeeping” and stayed around among their kinfolks. That was the accepted thing to do.

Now about Aunt Shug. Her name wasn’t Shug. It was Indiana. Indiana Cole. She was born in south Arkansas along in the early 1850’s, a time when it was popular in the South to name girls for states.

My grandmother, who was Indiana’s younger sister, maintained that Shug was lucky their parents didn’t decide on California. She would have gone through life as “Callie.” Or, that they didn’t name her Tennessee. She would have been known as “Tennie.” Even worse, they could have named her Missouri, and she would have been “Zouri” to her dying day.

The Coles decided on “Indiana” for their infant daughter, and to dress that up a bit they added Elizabeth. But, she was such a tiny baby -- no bigger than a sugar loaf. So they began calling her “our little Sugar Loaf.” Soon that became “Shug.”

The result for Indiana was that all her life she was called Shug, Miss Shug, Cousin Shug, or Aunt Shug -- depending on who was talking. That is, except at our house.

When she came to our house, she was always “Aunt India.” Papa said we children were to call her that because she was his real aunt and because when he was twelve years old he made her a promise. She gave him a whole quarter of a dollar and made him promise, and repromise, that he would always call her “Aunt Elizabeth Indiana!”

“If I’d ‘a just been rich,” she was fond of saying during her last years, “I could’ve hired the whole shootin’ match! An’ done away with that sugar loaf business!”

But Aunt India was not rich. Once she had a home, a husband, children. But the husband died, and so did some of their children. Later she re-married and helped to raise a houseful of stepchildren, along with her remaining sons. All the youngsters grew up and moved away. The old man died, and she was obliged to “break up” and begin living among her kin, staying a few weeks with a sister, a month or two with a brother, and then with a niece or nephew -- wherever there was room at the table and an extra chair by the hearth.

Wherever she went, Aunt India always carried a little present. It might be a string of tatting lace she had made, a cutting from a rosebush, a setting of hen eggs. Often it was a handful of flower seeds, tied up in a crumpled white rag. More often than not these were periwinkle seeds.

Each time my mamma saw papa’s elderly aunt come hobbling through our front gate she would murmur, “Ah, here comes poor old Aunt India and her periwinkle seeds!”

But mama would welcome the bent old woman, settle her down in a rocking chair, and say, “Oh, you’ve brought us some flower seeds! How nice!”

And mamma meant what she said. She would take the little wad of seeds and Aunt India’s sacks and what she called “my budgets” (she didn’t have a suitcase) and say, “Aunt India, we’ve been thinkin’ maybe you could come, and I saved you some salt meat skins you like for your feet.’’

While Aunt India was leaning back, sighing a sigh of relief -- and shuffling off her dusty shoes -- mamma would hurry out to the smokehouse and bring back wide pieces of pork skin she had peeled off the side of a ham. These, she helped Aunt India to bind on to the huge calluses on the soles of both her feet.

“Ah,” Aunt India would tell mamma, “there’s nothing like salty meat skins to soften up these old callus boogers! They won’t hurt so bad, once they’re soft.”

Aunt India never talked much. “Well,” she would explain to papa when he teased her, “if I can’t think of somethin’ good to say about anybody, I just won’t say nothin’!”

Aunt India didn’t know about double negatives. But she knew the best things about life, how to live it, and how to accept what it brought her way. And she left in her wake a trail of bright blue and white flowers.

There is much to learn from the likes of Elizabeth Indiana, the little sugar loaf who came to be the periwinkle lady.

Published November 1979. Click your browser’s ‘Back’ button to return.