It’s hard for me to believe that my husband’s aunt, Linda Cole has been in Heaven for over six years now. I remember so well the times we went to visit her and Uncle Bobby Cole, when they lived in Kennebec, South Dakota when our girls, Corrie Petersen and Amy Royce were little. It wasn’t that going to the small, and I do mean small town, with a population of 334 in the 1980s, that has dwindled to 281 in 2020, but rather that Linda and Bobby were fun people to be around. Pretty much, we sat around and played cards. It wasn’t the card games, but rather the laughter and jokes, the fun conversations, and really just the time together that made the trips fun. There was also the added benefit of cousins, Sheila and Pat for the girls to play with. And the additional added benefit of a vacation with little cost. Of course, that was not why we wet. We went because we liked Linda and Bobby, and the visit was always fun. Following a fire at the hotel that Linda and Bobby owned in Kennebec, they made the decision to move to Winnemucca, Nevada and that was when the yearly visits ended. We did go, but it was further to go, and so not as easy to manage, and so happened less and less often. It was the end of an era.
Aunt Linda was the middle child of parents, Robert and Nettie Knox, between sisters Joann Schulenberg and Margee Kountz. There were almost 16 years between Joann (my mother-in-law) and her first younger sister, Linda, and then three years between Linda and Margee. Because of the years between them, Linda became a very young aunt in 1950, when my sister-in-law, Marlyce Schulenberg was born, and she didn’t like it one bit!! It wasn’t that she didn’t love Marlyce, because she did. The problem was that Linda didn’t understand the word…aunt. As a little girl of only 3 years and 7 months. So, being a little girl, she misunderstood the word Aunt and thought she was going to be an ant!! She was absolutely not interested in being a bug!!
Linda was a funny person even as a child, and maybe that was that made her and Bobby so much fun to be around. The funny things she always said, and her infectious laugh were a big part of what I loved about her. In fact, I find that when I think about her, I really miss her to this day. While we didn’t see them as much in the last years of their lives, and I think that is really too bad. Today would have been Linda’s 76th birthday, and I am sorry that she isn’t still with us. Happy birthday in Heaven, Linda. We love and miss you very much.
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