Like another of my favorite great-aunts, Rilla was creative and fiercely independent. Given that preference, I never understood her fondness for the Ouiji board or her willingness to consult it when decisions were necessary, but inconsistencies are the stuff of life. She simply didn’t want anyone telling her what to do. Decades later, a pair of cousins agreed it wasn’t so much men-in-general whom she found offensive.
Rilla never married, famously acknowledging she might have done so had marriage not necessitated the presence of a man in her life. Confronted with a passle of bored children, she was capable of sending them to the back yard with a stack of 78 rpm records and a hammer, essentially saying, “Have at it.” From what my mother recalled of the unfolding events on one such afternoon, “It was fun.”
She returned the children’s affection, although she often scandalized more conventional relatives with her baby-sitting techniques. To my mother, whose great-aunt she was, Rilla was just slightly dangerous, a force to be reckoned with, a strange, self-possessed woman whose refusal of rules and wicked sense of humor made her a favorite among the children. So she appears in this photograph from an indeterminate time and an unknown place, but as she herself might have said, appearances can be relieving.
