Aunt Nasty

Warning: Some readers may find her opinions abrasive, disturbing, or even offensive.)

LOVE. Well now there's a word I hear bandied around quite a bit in my extended family.

As you know, I have six sisters.

All of them married, many with some children. Some with many, many children.

Just this last Christmas I spent the festive season with my sister Pansy and her family. Pansy-Wansy's husband Hector is a geologist, and is off jaunting around the world quite a bit. He's seldom home to celebrate Christmas with her and their daughter Bernice.

Hector says he LOVES his work, but I've done a little snooping on my own, and found out what he REALLY LOVES is his secretary. A lot. And often. According to my research, many of his so-called 'geological seminars' have been thinly-veiled excuses for a three-day romp in the dirt with the secretary (if you know what I mean).

Mind you, my next-older sister Pansy must be dumber than a rock not to have noticed what's going on. Hector comes home smiling and bearing gifts and tells her how much he LOVES her, and how lucky he is to come home to such a wonderful little woman....makes me want to puke, I tell you. If you're getting the message that I'm not too keen on my brother-in-law Hector, you'd be right on the money.

And money, oh yes, he makes plenty of that all right. Enough to insist Bernice live at home and keep her mother company. He bought each of them a nice little Mercedes, so they don't even have to share a car. Crafty bugger, isn't he? And he brings them presents from all over the world. Why, their home looks more like a museum than a house in suburbia, what with all those strange and exotic artifacts all over the place.

Anyway, here we are sitting around on Christmas morning opening the gifts from under the tree, and Bernice is so thrilled because her Dad gave her a crocodile-skin handbag and a matching pair of shoes! Didn't do a hell of a lot for the crocodile, but Bernice LOVED them.

Hector (and his sexretary) had been on a 'field trip' to Australia in November, so of course the stuff he brought back all had that "Oz" flavour. For Pansy's gift he must have shelled out a fortune.....it was the most fabulous gold pendant set with an enormous black opal. Me, he gave a stuffed Queensland cane toad. No, he doesn't like me either, but he has to at least put on a show, because he's scared stiff that I'll spill the beans to Pansy about his little floozy on the side. Y'know, I actually DO enjoy watching that man squirm!

And Bernice; well, Bernice can't be all that stupid, after all she is a schoolteacher. It's a good thing she doesn't teach English though, cause the girl can't spell worth squat. (These days it's all computers and calculators, not like in my day when we had to use our brains to figure things out.)

So you want ME to tell you about LOVE? Well, Hector says he LOVES Pansy, and he cheats on her. Pansy says she LOVES Hector, (why, I'll never know; he's such a twerp) and she just smiles and puts up with it all. Bernice says she LOVES her parents and her job. (Free room and board and a Mercedes might help some, but I've never been too sure about Bernice.)

So I ask you, how on earth do you really expect ME to define LOVE? Darned if I know. But then, perhaps my family IS a bit strange............................

Aunty Nasty

By Nasturtium Blackwitt