Aunt Ella

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love
of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having,
in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.
—Laura Ingalls Wilder

I’ve been thinking about my Great-Aunt Ella this week. Ella Viola Erickson Yeates Thompson. A really long name for a five-foot-nothing, petite woman. Aunt Ella is my grandma’s only sister, and she was like a second grandma to me and my cousins.

I believe my thinking started with a trip to the temple, where I did the work for a sister named Ella. And it’s Christmas. Aunt Ella always gave the best Christmas presents.

Well that’s not quite right. Truth be told, I can’t remember a single specific gift, but she was an expert at exciting packaging. Hers were always the best gifts to shake and handle, full of odd shapes, unique textures and interesting sounds. My siblings and I would bring Aunt Ella’s presents home after the family Christmas party and put them under the tree, but they wouldn’t stay there for long; it was too much fun to try to figure out what was inside. And her packaging was always designed to thwart our investigation—with a random jingle bell or something similar tucked inside—so the actual contents were always a surprise on Christmas morning!

I always felt a special connection to Aunt Ella (though I'm willing to bet I wasn’t the only one of my cousins who did). In a family full of farmers and engineers, accountants and amateur astronomers, she was the one adult in my extended family who seemed as excited about literature as I was. She often asked me about what I was reading in school, and when I was studying Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in high school, she spoke excitedly with me about how she loved that poem.

I also remember her high heels, her tiny feet, her tailored jackets and one particularly soft velvet skirt. To my young eyes, she always looked so put together and even elegant. I wonder if she'd laugh to hear me say that!

I was not quite grown up when she died, and as I think about her, I’m sad that I didn’t get to know her well in my adult life. She never had children, though she did mother many children who were not her own. She was married, and widowed, and married again, and widowed again. I would love to know how these experiences impacted her, and what they taught her. I would love to have shared more literature with her as I continued to study English at BYU and USU. And it would have been great fun to learn her Christmas packaging secrets now that I have young nieces and a nephew to gift-wrap for.

Though, as much as I wish that I had the chance to know her better as an adult, I know I will see her again and will get that chance at some point. And I won’t be a bit surprised to learn that our association began well before either of us was born, and so I already know her very well, after all. 

Aunt Ella's headstone in Heber City, Utah