Aunt Marion

Marion Dunlap Hardy

August 1913- August 1991

My Aunt Marion was born 3 years after her brother, Lawrence, in Madison, Wisconsin. 

Her first big achievement took place at age 5  in 1918: she survived a near-fatal case of meningitis.  Her rewards were life and a Schoenhut doll who she sewed clothes for and named Marion.  The doll Marion had a little blue woolen blanket with the initials MD on one corner.  A very sturdy Philadelphia-made doll, it looked like china but was made of unbreakable wood and had working joints. Like my aunt, the doll Marion was a survivor and designed for action.

My Uncle Larry told me that Marion was a tree climber and especially liked scaling a large tree in the city park near their home..  One day, while up in the tree, she made the mistake of looking down and froze.  Her mother, Florence, sent Lawrence out to find her.  Lawrence went home and reported her whereabouts and that it didn't look like she was coming down anytime soon.  Florence made a pan of fudge and sent Lawrence back to the park with it to entice Marion down.  It worked.

I don't really remember meeting my Aunt Marion until I was 8 or 9 years old.  I was dropped off for a few hours while my father taxied my oldest sister to Long Island.   Aunt Marion taught me how to sew, cutting out the material for a little handbag on the large rock in her basement in Stony Creek, Connecticut.  It was summertime and hot.  The cellar was delightfully cool.  My cousin Stephen spent a lot of time down there, too, on projects and reading Tolkien.  Stephen took me out sailing that day to the Thimble islands. 

A couple of years later, my father drove us from our home in Rhode Island to Marion's in Stony Creek, Connecticut for lunch.  I was guilty of tailing my aunt's every move: kitchen to dining room, dining room to kitchen, and so forth.  Everything about her fascinated me: from the green Dippitty-Doo hair gel in the bathroom to the Baked Alaska she mentioned during the meal.  I had never heard of a state going into the oven.

The next year, 1969, my aunt and her husband, my Uncle Edward, moved to Cambridge, England so Edward could take a new position.  Marion and I developed a steady blue air mail correspondence.  I visited 3 times.  She came back 3 times.  She traveled the world with Uncle Edward to places other people did not go back then:  Addis Ababa, Russia, Africa.  Edward was an important person in a tight-knit ecclesiastical world.  He knew 13 languages.  He helped Desmond Tutu learn one of them. 

And now I will tell you, that when Marion died in 1991, 10 years after Edward, I became the keeper of Marion the Schoenhut doll,  who will soon be 100 years old:  Marion the observer and chaperone in our home, one shoe on and one shoe off, still wearing the dress that Marion the girl made for her.

Rowena Dunlap Burke

November 8, 2016