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IV
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It's All in the Family
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It was hard to imagine that Aunt Sarah had once been young. My usual assumption was that she had always been exactly as I saw her first, since she had then reached the stage, peculiar to old women, when physical change is nearly imperceptible. She wore long gray gingham dresses which were made for her downtown, according to a pattern of the late seventies. Her thin iron-gray hair was coiled in a tight uncompromising braid. Her eyes were a watery blue and her lips were thin and wrinkled, particularly when she removed her teeth. In the summer she covered her head with a sunbonnet when she went to walk, and replaced it by a moth-eaten beaver cap in the winter. In cool weather she always wore a Paisley shawl pinned with a cameo brooch that a Mr. Brindley had brought her from Rome when she was twenty-one. She took with her out-of-doors her father's ivory-headed stick and a small basket from Nantucket in which she carried chips or pine cones or food for the pigs. I remember that she referred to the pigs as her "hairy doves." She also kept a clasp knife in her pocket when she walked.