A Tribute to my Great Aunt

Mom, Dad, Beck and I visited Gram and Mimi at their Gulf Shores Condo in 1990...check out that Gulf of Mexico in the background!

Proof that this lady was the shutterbug...Tom and I inherited her picture-taking gene!

One of our trips to Canadian Lakes...with her camera in hand...with my bro, Andy.

Hanging with some of my kids...2000

This is a pic of Mimi with meme...this is how she is frozen in my mind most of the time 1973

On yet another trip to Canadian Lakes...this was the Octagon house...with the big pit in the middle of the house...it was sooooo cool!

1995, Mimi with her good friends, Phyllis and Henrietta...they are all gone!

It seems hard to believe that my Aunt Mimi is gone. We grew up near both of my parents families, and neither one of them have an exceptionally large family...so when we moved down to Indiana from Michigan in the fall of 1991, both sides essentially froze themselves in time to me. In my mind, sometimes, I imagine things they way they were. Grandma Greenhill still lives on Indianwood Road...Grandma with the Lake. Mimi lives on the same road as my Grandma Taylor...Grandma with the Wolfie...Mimi was the last of the oldest generation to pass away. It's sad to me.

She was born on March 20, 1919 and she left on June 1, 2008. She was the family shutterbug...always snapping pictures of all of her great-nieces and nephews...in fact, that infamous Wonder Woman pose of mine, that I posted here sometime back was taken by her. Many different times I would go for a weekend visit when she still lived in her old, way cool house in Detroit (before she moved to her condo in Lake Orion)! She took me to the Renaissance Center (RenCen for those Michiganders), dinner in fine places, circus and I was with her when I met my first weather man, Sonny Elliott...I was at her house when Princess Diana married Prince Charles and she woke me up so I could watch the fairy tale. She bought me my very own pack of that zebra fruit stripe gum, which was a big deal for me! She had such a cool back porch, glassed in, and we'd sit out there and eat our breakfast. (the coffee memory is fuzzy to me...was it her that drank it or my Gram G?)

Gram. G (my father's mother) was her younger sister and every summer, they would rent a different place in Canadian Lakes (still couldn't tell you where that is, exactly), we'd all visit them, stay in whatever cool house they had gotten that summer, eat in nice places, take walks, swim, sing group songs, etc. Ohhh, memories. I am a kid again. transported back in time to her attic, where she would keep toys and coloring stuff for us...I think I can still smell it. She was a classy lady, always so put together, nice jewelry, perfect hair. She had a job with GM as an executive secretary.

I could go on but I need to consider packing some stuff and doing some laundry...I'm sure I'll get some pix this weekend! Stay tuned folks!

Thanks for letting me remember Aunt Mimi! pray for all of us as we begin our trek up for the visitation and funeral!