Aunt Patsy Gets married

When I was about 7, my Aunt Patsy—my mother’s younger sister—announced that she was getting married. She was something of a holdout in the marriage department. She was in her late twenties and some were beginning to speculate that she would never marry. This was the early ‘70s, and by that time, it wasn’t unheard of for a woman to lead an independent life, but this was West Virginia, and Patsy hadn’t been raised to be an independent woman. Patsy had lived at home with her mother until she died, and then she moved in with my Aunt Betty and her husband. Patsy never had a job, and Aunt Betty and Uncle Cecile didn’t appreciate supporting her. Maybe that’s why she finally found herself a man and accepted his proposal.

When the news spread, everyone was shocked by her choice, and the general consensus was that Patsy was marrying beneath herself. Now you have to understand that for someone in my mother’s family to do that was quite extraordinary considering most of them lived in dilapidated coal company houses and drove around in twenty-year-old pickups held together with bailing wire. But my soon to be Uncle Robert was someone who didn’t bathe regularly. He was someone who supported himself with odd jobs and had been fired from most of them. A three day gig was obviously too much responsibility for him. He was notoriously unreliable, more than a little nutty, not very bright, not particularly likable and he smelled bad. And Aunt Patsy was going to marry him.

Well, the wedding day came, and we all gathered at a little country church. Some had worried that Robert would wear his trashy, unwashed clothes, so my Uncle Daniel lent him a suit, but no one wore Robert’s shoe size, so many speculated that he would show up barefoot. Robert often went barefoot even in late fall and early spring.

We waited an hour, and many were starting to stir. Then we waited a half hour more. That’s when my uncles Daniel, Les and Boone decided they should go looking for Robert. They found him in the county jail. He had been arrested the night before for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct. My uncles bailed him out and brought him to the church. Thankfully, he was wearing shoes.

Aunt Patsy was a lovely bride. She was a sweet, chatty woman and a hypochondriac. I adored her. I had never been to a wedding before, and seeing her in a long white dress with a train and a veil made quite an impression on me.

Aunt Patsy and Uncle Robert are still together. However, it’s not exactly been a happy marriage, but that’s another story.