Ain't

English professors will tell you that ain't ain't a word. Sure gets spoken a lot, but that's also the way certain "down east" North Carolina people pronounce aunt. Bertha Mae Godley Jones was my "half" sister's aunt and was just as much my aunt as my sister Martha is my sister. There is a lot more to family than DNA and some relationships can be more enduring than those of a biological nature. Duh.
As a child, we visited Chocowinity to see the Godleys, Uncle Floyd, a sort of Junior Samples character, Granny Godley, Vivian, Bertha Mae, Uncle Frank and my cousin Liz, who was not my cousin but I had a crush on her and last time I saw her at Mom's funeral she was mm mm good looking still.
On these visits we'd go across the river to nearby Washington, NC. "Original" Washington, as they prefer to call it but "Little" Washington, when I was a child, the home of sand spurs and a lack of comfort. There, we would visit my dad's mom and brother, Haywood. Dad's mom was a Jones, before marrying Benjamin H Roebuck Senior and today I noticed that Bertha Mae had married a Jones.
I enjoyed especially Chocowinity and the farm the Godleys lived in with a huge pecan tree and early mornings gathering eggs for breakfast. Quite different from suburban life in Falls Church, seven miles from Washington, DC.

When life is difficult, as it increasingly is, memories like this help us maintain a degree of sanity and as Mac Davis put it in his song, "sweeten through the ages, just like wine."