Remembering a Great Lady

This past weekend, we attended the memorial gathering for Adeline Smith, the beloved aunt of the Dinosaur, who passed away in August. Because she was so much loved by so many, a large group of family and friends gathered in Fresno to bid her farewell.

Dino relayed a couple of his favorite Adeline stories:

She was still teaching at Auberry then, and early in the season would drive up to the lake in her MG and in her school clothes. Then go across the lake late Friday nights and go into the ranch. I believe she had her horse there the first year or so to ride into the ranch. She would point out birds and flowers along the trail and I wished I was interested in them then to be able to learn her full extent of the environment.For the first few years I was running the boat and store by myself until late in the season, when I’d get a helper. One of the times Adeline came down for a week or so, and this was when the store was the old bunk house, and we lived in a dirt-floored tin lean-to behind the store. One meal I had cooked up a bunch of spaghetti, and was using the faucet across the road to cool off the cooked spaghetti when the spaghetti slipped out onto the ground. Adeline’s comment: “just rinse it off, it will be fine.”

Then there was the time when I had probably hiked into the ranch for a quick meal and hot bath before returning to the boathouse, and was drying the dishes Adeline was washing. Now to set the stage, my sister and I had to wash dishes from an early age at Church and Masonic lodges dinners, and did so under the careful eye of a bunch of old biddies who were clucking and harrumphing over any minute imperfection in our technique. I remember noticing a bit of food still on the washed plate. Adeline’s advice: “just scrape it off with the dish towel.”