The nice thing about being a kid is you don't even have to pretend to be fair. You can have a favorite grandmother or a fun uncle that you really love and nobody blinks an eye. You're kids; the family expects you to be brainless and impulsive. Nobody gets their noses out of joint if they aren't the champions of the Harper family popularity contest.
Which is good, because there'd be a lot of unhappy losers out there, because aunt Anna was hands down, year after year, the favorite Harper for me and the other kids. Moms and dads certainly couldn't compare. Grandparents? Major bore. Even a number of the adults in the family judged Anna their favorite relative.
The reason for this popularity is simple: Anna doesn't fight fair. Other adults hold various mundane positions: businessperson, dentist, school principal, and other boring boring boring jobs.
But Aunt Anna is a writer. She got the bug early and never looked back. By the time she was 17 she had published her first novel ('Otherwise Tales,' science fiction). Fiction, nonfiction, scripts and screenplays, all kinds of genres and even a little songwriting; she writes it all.
I'm told she's good at it. She always makes deadlines, her work doesn't need much in the way of editing or revisions and her stories sell well. Since she loves what she's doing, she lives a pretty relaxed lifestyle.
Anna being a writer is pretty cool to us kids, too. She works when she wants, on whatever she wants. She doesn't sweat about keeping her job or kissing the boss's bottom. And when she's not in the grip of writing-fervor, she's always ready with a lap, a cuddle and a good story.
It's a nice lap, too. Anna is Dad's older sister and she keeps herself in good shape, for an oldster. Let's see, Dad is coming up on thirty-eight, so that makes Anna about forty. Old, but not ready for the grave yet.
She tends to go into her creative fits at night, so she has plenty of time for hiking, bicycling, swimming and even a little surfing. So again, she looks pretty good... for an oldster.
Which brings up the other reason everybody loves Aunt Anna.
She lives in Hawaii.
To be specific, Maui. About the time Dad married Mom, Anna went to Maui for a writer's conference and never left. She went, as she describes it, "...From a brutal winter in industrial Illinois to a place that tourists think is Paradise..." and found that for her, it actually was.
Of course, when you move to paradise, everybody wants to visit, and that was fine with Anna. She loves us kids and she likes visitors. "They help get me out of my head," she says. One of the favorite experiences of everyone visiting isn't the ocean or whatever cultural junk, but just talking to Anna.
She's a great listener. She loves listening to people tell stories, "for source material," she claims. Also she says it's good for blackmail.
So Mom and Dad and my sister Amelia and I have been frequent visitors to aunt Anna. Sometimes it feels like a mob scene with our cousins sleeping in piles on floors, in hammocks or air mattresses, adults on couches, etc. Aunts Sofia and Mara both had three kids each, throw in Mom's in-laws dropping in sometimes and you're looking at kid chaos.
Anna took it all in stride. She got good at organizing kids into work parties (that actually did feel like parties), that would throw together meals, clean up the morning mess, do yard work or anything else she could think of to keep little hands busy. "Y'all are getting so good at this," she would bellow, "that I might hire you out to the neighbors. Anna's Kiddie Chain Gang!"
I have to say, I miss it. The kids, the noise, the energy. It was fun, much though we complained when Candice and Janie were fighting, or when Jonathan stole Amelia's bikini top and paraded around the beach in it. Thinking back on it, I have to admit he probably filled it better than she did back then. At least her breasts have managed to fill out quite a bit since.
But now, here it was summer in Maui, and I was bored and alone. How did that happen? We'd never been by ourselves at Anna's before. Where were Karl and Bessie; where were Judy and Lonna and Pete-Ronnie-Jayne-Louisa and where were everyone?
Who'd ever believe there was an off-season at Anna's? But there was, and we had hit it. "The girls are still in school for a couple weeks," explained Aunt Mara.
Aunt Sofia said, "we're saving our vacation days for when we come out there at Xmas." So no cousins for company.
Even our being at Aunt Anna's was unexpected. I had just graduated high school a week ago (and had just turned the magic age of eighteen a week before that), and Amelia, a year older, wasn't due back at university until October. We were both expecting to laze the summer away.
But Mom was suddenly invited by a good friend of hers to go on a river and bicycle tour across Europe. The sleaze ball husband of her friend had backed out at the last minute, evidently after he suddenly realized that for the next two weeks he would be forced to screw nobody but his wife on a romantic tour. He left instead for a resort in the Bahamas, bringing his secretary along for company. What a cliche.
So Mom was headed for a month touring Europe and trying to salvage the broken spirit of her friend. Dad was understanding; he liked Mom's friend too. "Hey!" he said, "Why don't we go see Aunt Anna? It's going to be a month anyway before school renovations are done." Dad was the school principal I'd mentioned.
An inspired solution, all agreed. Airfare on short notice threatened to sink the whole idea, but some diligent work on the internet and we had three cramped peon-class seats on a late-night flight into Kahului Airport. As we all raced around the house getting our stuff together, my sister did a sexy little dance with her hips and chanted, "I'm goin' O-G-G, I'm goin' O-G-G." I didn't care if she was my sister, Amelia could sure dance. Some serious butt shaking.
Twelve hours later we were at Aunt Anna's, tired, sleep-deprived, and feeling like Guantanamo escapees. In other words, like typical Hawaiian Airlines passengers. Anna knew and understood, from long practice. "You all get yer butts into bed! I don't want to see or hear you before lunch. And I mean late lunch!"
We were all in much better shape after rest and food, including Anna who'd gotten half a chapter of work knocked out. Then she showed us around her new house.
Like I said, in the past things could get pretty crowded around Anna's. Not any more. After years of writing different genres, Anna had discovered romance novels and the romance fiction community in turn had discovered Anna. The result was financial security like she had never known before. Book sales, the love of her fans... and a roomy new house in Wailuku.
"Actually, it's an old house," explained Anna proudly. "Built in the 1920's before they ruined houses with air conditioning. They laid it out so every room keeps comfortable as long as the wind is blowing... and on Maui the wind is always blowing."
What interested me were all the rooms. The house was shaped almost in a spiral, with the kitchen and living room in one arm of it, a bunch of bedrooms, guest rooms and bathrooms in another wing, and Aunt Anna's refuge in a whole separate arm, joined by a covered walkway. "I've got a great old door," chortled Anna. "You kids can go as crazy as you want, and I can't hear any of it. I can sleep, I can write and you can't stop me!"
And I had a door too. Until Aunt Mara and her girls showed up, I had a room all to myself. Amelia too, and Dad, we all had our own spaces. With just the three of us, even sharing a bathroom wasn't bad.
