I miss her. She understood me so well, maybe even better than I understood her. I could show her all my emotional attachment to a book and its heroine, and I never had to fear that she would think it was silly. She loved books, as I do, and children, and animals. She loved to have a cat sitting in her lap.
Today my blog reading list turned up someone's experience with the Little Women film (Winona Ryder version). I had watched that when it was new and caught it again a few months ago. It really brought home how much I miss my aunt. With her, I wouldn't owe any explanation for how much I identified with Jo March and how seeing the movie again was something like a family reunion for me: seeing people whom I knew but had not seen for years, people I loved.
(It is worth noting that I probably own more Louisa May Alcott books than most people own books, period. I have an obsession stemming from finding and loving Little Women when I was just a little girl.)
She would have totally gotten it. We would have compared childhood literary influences and heroines.
My aunt loved chocolate pudding too. Toward the end of her life, her disabilities made it impossible for her to eat it neatly, so when she did have pudding, she ate it as privately as possible and made a merry mess. Because it was chocolate pudding and she loved it.
Ever since she died, whenever the thought occurred, I would glance upward and say or merely think, "Chocolate pudding." Originally it was, "God, you had better have chocolate pudding there for her. Chocolate. Pudding." Over time it got distilled down to the two words and the same insistence.
This morning, before the sun came up, I couldn't sleep for these thoughts swirling. I went to the fridge, got the last cup of chocolate pudding, and ate it in slow contemplation. It's the closest I could come to sharing pudding with her.
I miss her so, so much.
