Lita Poem by anais vionet

We're on Fall break this week and Peter's favorite aunt - Lita - is visiting. Lita's a tall, slim woman (eek! A guess) , in her early sixties. She's nicely weathered and tan. I'm sure she once had Peter's blue-black hair but now it's mostly white and styled in a loose braid. I think she rocks the coastal grandma aesthetic with a wardrobe of mostly pale tans, whites and flats.

Peter has all kinds of stories about her - she's a character. When Peter was 5, on Halloween, Lita pretended to sacrifice a chicken, cackling, like a witch. He was wide-eyed until she admitted she was just making fried chicken for dinner.

Lita lives on property adjacent to Peter's parents, but hers is larger, more of a farm, where she raises chickens and grows Meyer-lemons and persimmons. This may explain why Peter slices up lemons, dips them in sugar and eats them like oranges (I shiver) . Peter told me that Lita always liked fruit, which is why she bought Apple stock in 1997.

From what I've learned, talking to Lita, she practically raised Peter's dad (David) . Their parents had a boy before her, an older brother she doesn't remember meeting because he drowned at a church outing when she was a toddler. Their parents, in their grief, had turned in on themselves, becoming as self-centered as gyroscopes.

They'd left Lita by herself for weeks at a time, to raise herself on a more-or-less trial-and-error basis. So, when David came along 13 years later, he became her responsibility. She started working as an auto mechanic and eventually opened a couple of shops of her own. She describes herself as more well-read than formally educated - as if knowledge had just settled on her, like dust from an old library.

"Teressa (Peter's mom) is very curious about you, " Lita confides to me as we huddle together over venti pumpkin lattes, "Peter's very tight-lipped where you're concerned."
"He is? " I ask, confused, "maybe he's ashamed, " I venture, "or maybe he's planning to dump me? " Lita looks amused, "uh huh, that's probably IT, " she agrees.
"Look! I say excitedly, pulling an envelope from my purse, "It's my first-ever paycheck, " I beam. I make a production of opening the thing, like an Oscar envelope. "$223, " I read, shaking my head in admiration, then adding, with sincere sounding hyperbole, "he can't dump me NOW, I'm RICH! "