Photo of Julia Petsco Cosgrove & Paul Cosgrove Wedding with Grandpa Lajos Petsco. Excerpt from my 2007 Christmas letter: My Aunt Julia, my father’s sister, died in September. Age 88. A good age. Aunt Julie and her family lived near us in Queens. One could walk to her house, though I don’t believe I ever did. The walk from our house to the bus, and then the walk from the bus stop to her house I found wearying enough. But the walk between our houses was a breeze for those West Virginia-born Petscos. All of my father’s family really, really walk. I guess it was one of the few things they actually were able to do in the mountains and valleys of West Virginia. One wanted to go somewhere, one walked. They were used to walking. They liked walking/like walking. And aside from living fairly near each other, Aunt Julia and my father were always close in other ways. Perhaps it was because they were both born in early April, but they always seemed to well understand each other. And after my mother died, Aunt Julie took good care of my father, though she never intruded. It wasn’t her nature. Aunt Julia was very contained. She never complained. Never gave voice to a hardship or problem. And she had a hard life. A truly hard life. Always worked hard. Earned every single thing all her days. Kept all her hard times and all her hard work to herself. And she never stopped, until she was stopped. Last year, 2006, on a wintry-winter day, shortly before my Auntie Marion died, Aunt Julia was out sweeping the sidewalk in front of her house and collapsed. When she came to, she somehow managed to crawl inside her house, where she again passed out. She had had a stroke, or series of mini-strokes which left her weak. Very weak. But her mind was clear. And, strangely, she would even chatter on the telephone. Aunt Julia had never ever chattered. Phone calls had always been short. Terse. One-sided. Yet after the stroke, something loosened up and she even talked about the old days. Her girlhood in West Virginia. Her coming to New York. Even, her feelings. How hard it was for her to leave her sister Pearl and her brother Lawrence in West Virginia. How, just as soon as she was strong enough she had to go to Arizona to pay her respects to her niece Cynthia, since she had been too ill to get herself to her sister Marion’s funeral. And she had to stop and visit her nephew Richard “on the way out, . . . or maybe back.” And, strangely, “I’ve trying to figure out what happened to the family—why my parents separated. Why they didn’t stay together. Oh well, it was all so long ago. That’s that.” All this talking was very new. Very unexpected. Very pleasant. And, although she did not like it, Aunt Julia knew that now, since the stoke, others would have to do things for her and she would allow them to do so. This from an always very independent, very self-reliant, very private woman. This from a woman who the previous Christmas at age 86 had climbed a ladder to take down the living room curtains, which she washed, ironed, and again climbed the ladder to re-hang—as she always had. The ladder reminds me: a couple years earlier Aunt Julia had hired a man to fix her roof. She thought he was a bit too quiet up there on her roof, so Aunt Julie decided to check things out. Her house is two stories high, but the downstairs had had a very high ceiling, thus the man’s ladder stretched up about two and half stories outside the house to her roof. At 80+ years, Aunt Julie climbed that ladder up to the roof. The man was sunning himself, doing a bit of exercising. Aunt Julia yelled, “I’m not paying you to exercise on my roof.” The man jumped. He looked all around and asked, “How did you get here?” Aunt Julie said, “What’d you mean, how did I get here. I climbed your ladder, that’s how.” That was Aunt Julie. The day Aunt Julia died, her daughter JoAnn prepared guluska for lunch. An old dish. Peasant food. Sautéed broadnoodles mixed with pot cheese, ground walnuts or lekvar [Hungarian prune butter]. You can’t buy pot cheese anymore. You can substitute large curd, well-drained cottage cheese. Works almost as well. And a sprinkling or two of sugar on top. Sometimes, three sprinklings, when mother wasn’t looking. Though she always knew. Galuska, and once again it is childhood. With mother at the stove. Or Grandma. A dish that evokes memories. Aunt Julia relished her cottage cheese-galuska lunch. Ate it all. Went for what was supposed to be a nap. Aunt Julie was a good woman. Her three children were everything to her. She was sincerely interested with all the family. Her grandchildren. Nieces. Nephews. Their children. But there was nothing more important to Aunt Julia than her three children. No sacrifice for her children was too great. A truly good woman.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:52:41 +0000
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