Aunt Ruby

My mom and Aunt Ruby

Today, while I was out with a couple of my girls, I got a text from my husband who had just gotten a call from my mother. She told him that her 92 year old sister, my Aunt Ruby, had died at 4 p.m.

The news wasn't completely unexpected. We had been called on Friday that Aunt Ruby was not expected to live long. She was 92, her body was worn out and she had expressed readiness to go.  But when I got the text, I cried.

When I was a child, my family made the trip to the Bootheel of Missouri a couple of times a year to visit her and her family. I have many happy memories of holding her kittens, eating delicious peaches off her trees, admiring her chrysanthemums, and listening to her tell stories. I loved her voice. In recent days, I'd stop by her nursing home and visit whenever we'd make the trek back to my home state of Tennessee.

Her voice and her wit were still the same during those nursing home stops.  It was always touching to see her and my mom together, talking about old times, and the new times - complete with what my mom laughingly calls an "organ recital."

We'll be making the trip to Campbell, MO, for the funeral. I'll see my cousins and we'll talk about the old times. About the ways our lives have intertwined, and how God has blessed us over the years.

I've been blessed to be her niece.

Ruby Ethel Petty Snider

February 8, 1920  - February 25, 2012

Aunt Ruby holding Luke in her chrysanthemum garden - 1989