She loved to read and took me often to the library. I know my deep love for libraries is primarily because of her influence. She told me not too many years ago that she had taken to writing a small "E" in the front of books she checked out at the library, to keep track of what she had already read.

I remember sitting with her on the front steps of her house, watching the tiny ants carrying things back and forth to their ant hills. For an only child with no close neighbors it was a valuable lesson to learn how to find endless fascination in the details of the world around me.

She took me into the woods, searching for dragon's tongue which we carefully dug up and planted in terrariums. I planted a terrarium just last week.

She taught me to play solitaire with an actual deck of cards. And she kept a toothbrush at her house for me. She let me into her life and took care of me.

For the last few years, she was unable to live alone at home and had to be moved into a nursing home. Summer before last when I was there, I helped move her from one where she was profoundly unhappy to a different, hopefully better, one nearby. But for someone who has lived alone for more than 30 years, a nursing home is a terribly hard adjustment to make.

I feel like I didn't know her as well as I should have. Teenagers are always more interested in themselves than their aging aunts and when I moved away I can't say I visited her as much as I should have when I was in town.

But I owe a lot of who I am to my Aunt Lou-Lou. I hope she knew that.