Great Aunt Lucy

One of my earliest memories of Lucy is of a middle aged woman in a tailored brown suit, wearing a large brimmed hat and riding a bicycle with a big bunch of sweet peas in a basket on the front. She stopped at my grandparents front gate and smiled at me. Perhaps I was 4 years old. Shyly I looked up and examined her more closely. She had olive skin and rosy flushed cheeks, nut brown eyes and whisps of long light brown hair which had escaped from under her hat. She seemed to know me and was obviously happy to see me.
I had never seen a woman of that age riding a bicycle. She was in her fifties at least. I was fascinated by her. My first vision of an independent woman with freedom to move around the streets on a bicycle. When I recall that day I visualise her as a kind of Mary Poppins figure.
My nana and mother didn't ride bicycles or drive cars in the nineteen fifties. They were much more likely to be found in the kitchen wearing a pinny and preparing meals or labouring over laundry.
Their husbands were the ones who went out into the world, while they were the homemakers.
Over the years, I grew to love Great Aunt Lucy. She travelled a lot and sent exotic presents from Far away places. A hairy coconut pasted with stamps arrived from Queensland. A blue butterfly wing under a glass rectangle, made into a ring. A ruler from New Zealand with strips of different woods which grew there. A set of Encyclopeadia Brittanicas in a wooden cabinet. I realise now that she was trying to broaden our minds and expand our horizons beyond the parochial boundaries of the country town in which we lived.
Luckily, as the oldest grandchild, I often stayed with my nana and pop and visited Lucy in the sprawling bungalow in Maylands. I remember her as a keen gardener, strong and suntanned beneath the smart clothes she made and wore. She explained how she could change the colours of the hydrangeas which grew in the moist shaded beds alongside the house. I thought it was magic. Alchemy!
Her shadowy house was cluttered with antique furniture, oriental mats and old pictures including one of a handsome young man in uniform. A sewing machine and piles of fabric covered the table in the dining room.  Coats and hats hung on hooks in the entrance hall. There was a lingering smell of  corned beef mingled with freshly cut flowers and furniture polish. Dust motes danced in the slant of light from a bow window.
My brothers and I called her "the brown aunt" because her clothes, her colouring and her house were overwhelmingly brown. It was an earthy warm brown, a generous twinkling brown, the dusky brown of a sepia coloured life. Her older sister May on the other hand was the blue aunt, with blue eyes, white hair, pale skin. She always wore blue dresses and coats and had a thin lipped, paler personality. Their houses were alongside each other in Phillis Street, with a paddock in between and a massive old pepper tree overhanging the side gate which opened on to a well worn track between the houses.