Aunt Ada's apartment at the retirement center was off a broad hallway with a low shelf decorated with painted wood ducks and dried-flower knickknacks.

When she opened the door, I was surprised at her stature, so small in contrast to my memories, and frail. Aunt Ada was always a strong woman, large and rollicking, her voice a deep, mellow stream of gregarious, mischievous power.The voice was still intact.

"Why, Dennis," she said, "of course I remember. Robert's boy. Dennis the Menace."

She motioned me into her small but practical living quarters.

"I have this wonderful balcony," she motioned toward a door by a bright window opening onto a narrow balcony. ". . . But I had the most terrible experience last weekend. I locked myself out and couldn't get back in. I didn't have a jacket and just my light dress that I wore to church. Well, I yelled and yelled and couldn't get anyone's attention, and it was two hours before someone came."

Her eyes had become more deep-set over the years. Her wrinkled face showed that time had slipped quickly since I last saw her. The faces of her children, my second cousins, tumbled over my mind as I tried to focus on her world. She showed me a card from Joyce in Nigeria. I could picture Lois and Grant - Grant, with whom we would sometimes play hide-and-seek at Grandma's in Draper (I envisioned him running around the corner of the large spruce on the north side of the house), and Elaine in Springville, whom I see from time to time at the museum.

Why had I come to Aunt Ada? I had to be honest. For I was drawing information from a mystery, the subtlest edges of which only Aunt Ada and her daughter, Joyce, had ever given me any inkling of.

I had never known until a few years ago when I read Joyce's history of the old family home on Relation Street that Aunt Ada and my grandfather had an older sister. It as as if she had disappeared, whispered off the map of consciousness. Yet, from the time I became aware of her existence, her image had burned itself deeply into my awareness - as if she were still out there somewhere, hoping for someone to tell her story, a story muffled and confused.

There still may be some who will feel uncomfortable if her story is told, even now, after 90 years. But if I wait too long, maybe nothing more will be done and she will remain a tender footnote in Joyce's history .

"Aunt Ada, I want to know all I can about your older sister, the one who died in Idaho."

Conscious that she still had to be careful how she worded things, I could see Aunt Ada struggling in the opposing corners of her mind, those parts of her memory that had been so delicately accessed when Joyce had written the book, which now were less sharp. But she bravely stepped into the void and began to tell me what little she remembered about her sister.

"You see, I was only 5 when she died, so I don't remember very much about her, really."

She was struggling with her name.

"Mary Elida?" I asked.

"That's it. Mary Elida," she responded, a light in her eye. "Elida. We always called her Lida."

Lida.

Somehow Lida had been lost to the open memory of three generations. Whole families had grown from other starts. But Lida had died on the vine. I couldn't help but wonder about the worlds that might have been affected had she lived.

Aunt Ada's older sister had been confined to no more than a whisper, a tragic whisper in the dark.

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When I left, Aunt Ada walked with me down the hall, supported in part by her walker, which she called her "chariot." It would be time for dinner in a few minutes and she wanted to check her mail on the way.

"Lida taught Sunday School," she said. "Such a nice girl, and left with her brothers in Riverdale, the three of them, so young. And none of them prepared to deal with what they had to."

As she moved forward on the support of her chariot, I sensed in Aunt Ada a distant remembrance of pain and sorrow, for the sister she had barely known and for the brothers she had known much better and whom she missed now more than ever as she thought of the many years they had spent together, raising families of their own, while all the time in the back of their minds still trying to heal from the memory of their older sister, Lida.

To be continued.

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