Neebish Island 5: Aunt Bonnie, Prayer and the Bible

Last night I put out the American flag.  It is waving on the cabin deck now like all the other cabins on our strip.  I counted 12 flags on my quarter mile walk between my cabin and my grandma's cabin.  If I stay here much longer, I too will become a Fox watching, WSJ reading, anti Obamacare Republican.  I literally can't wait for the island mail to come at 1:30PM so I can see what the WSJ has to say about that ridiculous Detroit bailout or how awful universal healthcare is, especially for the elderly.

Yesterday's daily relative surprise came from my mom's other sister, Aunt Bonnie.  We have always been close.  My mom is the oldest at 65, her next sister Linda is 61 and Bonnie is 59 and looks the best by far.  There are two brothers thrown in the mix whose ages I don't know as I don't really know them.  The sisters don't begrudge their absence in this season of grandma care, they explain, "they just aren't capable."  I think the are probably right.  Grandma care is a full time exhausting job, really best suited for my mom (an enneagram one with a two wing), Aunt Linda (a six) or Aunt Bonnie (a healthy nine).

Since I was probably 16, nearly 25 years ago, Aunt Bonnie and I have had real conversations.  She would tell me about her complex marriage  She has been a seamstress, like Grandma Lovejoy, a tax preparer and now a reflexoligist.  Her husband, Uncle Mike had a heart attack five years ago, he was basically dead on the kitchen floor while she was on the 911 call.   While the operator was telling her how to position Mike’s head she was speaking in tongues, casting out the demon of death, which, by the way, did come out.  The whole call is recorded, including when he was dead for seven minutes. She had us all listen to the call on my last Neebish visit.  

On this trip, I told her I no longer had an evangelical faith in Christ, she said she knew, she told me in the sweetest Aunt Bonnie kind of way that I was being deceived and asked to pray for me in the ole orange rocking chairs before she left.  Before I let her pray, I did ask, "Pray for what?"  We agreed that she could pray that we would both know the truth.  The woman has great skin.  "Amy, Jesus is my best friend, I talk to him all day long, he loves you immensely.  You are being deceived," she explained as we walked down the scarily steep driveway to the cabin.  "The enemy always gets people just where he knows they will fall away.  I don't want you to spend eternity in an awful place."  
My reply, "Aunt Bonnie, do you really believe this stuff?"

(Reading this aloud to my mom and Grandma in the car, Grandma said, of course she believes it  and so do I.  If you read the Bible through a few times you will know what is in it.  I used to read it all the way through every year).

We had a lovely afternoon on the island.