Monday, September 30, 2019
My very favorite Aunt Jay story involves her house on Thompson Street in Glastonbury, a farm where she lived with Grandma Brennan and Uncle Robert. Jay was always one to have simply beautiful gardens wherever she lived; both vegetable and flower. She truly had quite a gift. I was a little girl when they lived in what was then an old, very rustic house with the narrowest , most shallow antique staircase (sans railing) which you ever saw, leading to this wonderful large bathroom with claw foot tub adorned with one of Jay’s hooked rugs and, by virtue of the artist who lived there, ‘Jackson Pollack’, paint-spattered walls.
I helped (as much as a little one can) put in her extensive vegetable garden. Jay had read that lady-bugs were quite beneficial in eating garden pests and found a place where one could order a ‘box of lady-bugs’. Indeed, these came in a rolled corrugated box, refrigerated. She opened the box in the kitchen and those little lady-bugs awoke to the warm air inside and started flying everywhere! I can still see and hear Aunt Jay who, with a ‘whoop’ grabbed the box and ran to the garden to release them!
