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

Granddaddy Dunlap Poem

He's a pot belly guy,

Hair as white as snow,

His teeth like ivory,

And his blue eyes glow,

His funny sounding laugh,

And his lively booming voice,

And short stubby whiskers,

(And he's good-looking, too!)


-Rowena Dunlap, 1966

Granddaddy Dunlap Prose Piece

Each night I go to sleep under Granddaddy's blanket.

I carefully stitched his nametag back on a few years ago.

When I gaze at photos of him now, I address him as Fred.

He is my hero.

I know he had his secrets.

His favorite horse was named Rosie, after a young woman he knew in New Mexico.

Rosie, literally, was a work horse.

When he was just out of high school,

a man he knew in town asked him where he was going to college.

My grandfather replied, "My father said there is no money."

Mr. Lawrence, the banker, said, "Your father can afford to send you wherever you want."

My grandfather escaped a life of farm work and went to Cornell to study forestry.

I don't know that he ever went home again.

He did write to his mother regularly: from Cornell, the Black Forest, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Washington, D.C. and Missouri.

He met my grandmother, Florence Hallowell, on the boat to Europe.

She was to go stay with her Aunt Sara for 2 years in France.

My Aunt Marion told me that Florence did not hear from Frederick for 3 years, until he was finished working in the Black Forest. 

He went to Morais to see her and they were married in her home town of Chicago in 1906.

Their first child, Nathaniel, died after 1 day.  The doctor held the forceps too tightly around his skull.

In 1910, my uncle was born.  My grandparents named him Lawrence, after the good banker back in Ohio.

-Rowena Dunlap Burke

October 25, 2016

After Picnic at Deception Pass

I will beam myself out to see the panoramic sunset that my brother sent me.

The water looks oh so inviting.  

Deceptively so, it is deafeningly cold.

Now I am thinking about the food-  I am salivating

Just thinking about the morsels my brother ate.

Smoked salmon?  Eels?  Vinegar chips?

Yesterday I sewed a new linen dress, the hottest pink of the sunset.

I'll wear it when I go whooshing Westward 

In the Beam Machine.

Summer day

Summer eve

Summer dress

S'mores

Something's cooking

Wait for me

Gotta go eat!

           -Rowena
 August 2016

Moon Drone

Shoot for the moon

Shoot for the bridge

Shoot for the Sky,

Shoot for the ladies climbing out of the water

Onto the pier.

The google-eyed insect

Bearing down on us,

As the google-eyed men

Steer it over our heads,

Bearing down flirtatiously.

Moon drone, cool water, dog daze, moon drone.

We are not undone by a drone.


-Rowena Dunlap Burke

Kay's Hair

Kay had a routine:  once a month she went to the Vocational school and had her hair cut by a high school cosmetology student.  By age ninety, she kept it very simple, to go with her basic sweatshirt and jeans.

Kay had been a career teacher of lucky second graders, wife and helpmate to a veterinarian, who left her a widow twenty-five years earlier.  The leftover evidence of her former life was the stainless steel surgery table in the kitchen, used as a counter for creating sandwiches and such like.  Kay’s life was not without humor.

One day I swung by on my bike to visit Kay and find out the latest neighborhood news.  This day she regaled me with the recent day that she served as a final exam model for her cosmetology student.  Being extremely agreeable, Kay had said yes to the student, though she had no idea what it would entail and how long it would take.  It took a whole school day.  Kay had pin curls.  Kay had platinum hair.  Kay had red hair.  Every time she saw herself in the mirror, she had a new look.  It made her dizzy!  Finally, the student brought her back to being simply Kay.

That is the story of Kay’s hair.

Rowena

July 2016

The Rejected Shoes

The Rejected Shoes

When I was twelve years old, my Aunt Betty gave me a formal framed portrait of my father, taken by Bachrach Studios in Boston about 1940.  I have kept it on my bureau ever since.  In this photo, my father looks young and sultry, as I had never seen him look before.  I am the fifth child, born when he was nearly forty years old.  I remember him with wrinkles, so many wrinkles that he had to stretch the skin on his face to shave every morning.

One day when he was having coffee at my house, I brought out the photo to show him.  He was in his late eighties by this time.  He told me the photographer was looking for business and hoping for MIT students to order and pay for lots of prints.  This was my father’s only copy.  It was free.  He sent it home to his mother in Missouri.  He said the photographer asked him to lower his eyelids, which successfully gave the look of ‘bedroom eyes’.

Then my old wrinkled father told me a story:  He had to work whenever he could.  He took work on contract with New England Candy Company, next door to MIT, where they wanted the wafers to dry more quickly.  From his description, it sounded like he invented the microwave oven. 

However, the real story here is the consulting work he took in the shoe factory to improve the operation of equipment.  First, the owner showed him the room where the men worked making the soles.  Then he brought my father to the floor where the women worked on the uppers.  My father told me the room became very quiet and then a low but very audible whistle of admiration came from the factory women for a rare handsome and observant young man on the factory floor.

My father consulted with the shoe factory most of that summer.  At the end of the summer, the factory owner asked him what size shoes he wore.  “Eleven B.”, he told him. At this answer, the owner brought out a brand new pair of handmade shoes, made for and rejected by the bishop of Michigan.  The leather and workmanship were exquisite. 

The shoes were his parting gift to my father.  How my father loved those shoes!  Then he said, the bishop of Michigan was an antiSemitic radio host who did not deserve those shoes.