Chelle Robertson
Some of my finest and favorite memories of my aunt Mary include time spent together on Friday nights at my dad's house in Merrillville Indiana when we were kids and she and her sister Judy were living in Hammond, Indiana. There was the night my brother and I performed Madame Butterfly for them using the blankets from the couch to pretend we were butterflies. Mary laughed so hard she cried. There were the games of mahjong which we never could win against she and Judy. Well...kids with a bunch of porcelain tiles and Friday nights hopped up on Kool-Aid never did mix. But then there was the Dairy Queen adventure. Picture my brother and I and aunt Mary in the back of Judy's flat bed truck-ster with "creamies", Mary's name for swirled white vanilla ice cream with "crunchies" (colored sprinkles) on top. As the wind in the back of the truck-ster blew the ice cream away from our mouths into other people's eyes and hair, with creamies and colored nuts all over our face, we scream-chanted at stop lights to telepathically make them turn from red to green or green to red so that Judy would either have to slam on the brakes or fly through exceeding the speed limit. Mary, Ron, and me: "RED RED RED!" when the light was green, and "GREEN GREEN GREEN!" when the light was red. Her devotion to family was gold, and my recollections are liquid joy. She will always be close at heart and in my soul.