This is Great-Aunt Donna Lee, Queen of the Storytellers, Walker Woman from the famed Five Walker Sisters and Great-Grandma Walker, her mother, Mary Harriet.
Aunt Donna is my extended family’s matriarch and holds the family’s stories. She is the last of her generation and she holds the whispers and sighs of the a world that has passed. Aunt Donna is 87 years old, she was born in 1935, the Great Depression and then WW2. Bobby socks and drag races. Drinking hooch and working in the coal mines. Taking care of the little ones, one after the other, after the other. A world away. The past barely recognizable in its distance to now. The past in there whether we recognize it or not and there is Aunt Donna in the doorway, waving and her sweet smile.
Here she is, Donna Arringdale, nee’ Walker. I as her great-niece and fellow Walker Woman. We are the bridge from the past to the present to the future. Family. Blood. I had the beautiful pleasure and honor of interviewing Aunt Donna for my project, The Nature Of Refuge.
Aunt Donna shared her home, her laughter, her children and grandchildren, our family and our stories, with me, there that day that I rolled into Marshalltown. I was christened a Walker Woman at her dining room table that first night I visited and never have I felt more included and safe and part of our great, sprawling family tree. We are all so lucky to have one another, to have found one another, to be of one another.
Family.
This is the nature of refuge.
Please enjoy Aunt Donna’s full length interview here, she is such a treat!
Thank you Aunt Donna!
