love – TheWisdomYears.org

Auntie Irene

June 15, 2026June 21, 2026 Mary Elyn Bahlert

Suzie called her “the hugger.” Yes, Auntie Irene – one of the extroverted Bahlert’s – loved to hug us when we arrived at her house on Old Lime Kiln Road in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin. And she loved to hug us when we left. She was, indeed, “the hugger.” Like my dad, Frank Bahlert, Auntie Irene talked fast and kept on talking, no matter what. And she would cry sometimes, too. Her emotions came easily to her, and they couldn’t be kept quiet. It wasn’t quiet with Auntie Irene around.

When Dad had his two weeks off from the steel mill each summer, we’d drive up to Door County – 200 miles north of Milwaukee, a peninsula bordered by Lake Michigan on the East and Green Bay on the West – and spend a week.

Sometimes we stayed in a rented cabin, rented from the Kellstrom’s of Sister Bay, and sometimes we’d stay with my Uncle Fritz, Aunt Goldie, Bobbie and Susie. For several years, they lived on a farm East of Sister Bay, where they kept pigs. After a long day at the shipyards in Sturgeon Bay, Uncle Fritz, my Dad’s younger brother, would collect garbage from restaurants along the highway to feed the pigs. The fastest I ever rode in a vehicle – a small truck – was with Uncle Fritz. My cousin Bobbie in the middle, me on the passenger side, and Uncle Fritz at the wheel, he sped up to 100 miles per hour. I think I was too young to consider what could have happened at that speed – and without seatbelts. Uncle Fritz was one of the quiet Bahlert’s, like my Auntie Edna, Uncle Clarence, Uncle Ray, and my cousin Terry, Ray’s daughter.

Auntie Irene, like my Dad, was a talker – as well as a hugger. After college and after I had been hired as a Claims Representative in the Social Security Office in Green Bay, Wisconsin, I’d sometimes stay the weekend with Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich – others called him “Peggy.” They had an upstairs to their house, an upstairs reached by a narrow stairway built into the wall. I’d stay alone in one of the two rooms up that narrow passage, looking up from my bed at the trees that pressed against the windows as the wind blew. Food was always plentiful at Irene and Erdreich’s house. Auntie Irene would bring out dish after dish of good food, filling the table with her cooking along with her non-stop talking.

I liked to introduce friends to my family in Door County. Friends were always welcome. One day, I invited a friend who worked with me at the Social Security Office in Green Bay. We headed to Door County on Friday night. After we’d met Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich, Becky and I headed out for some adventure of our own. Becky surprised me as we pulled out of the driveway and onto the highway: “there’s no excuse for someone to be like that,” she said. My feelings about Auntie Irene did not change with her comment, but my feelings about Becky did. I had no excuse to be a friend of someone who judged these loving, kind folks so harshly.

Another friend traveled with me from California to Wisconsin, many years later. We, too, made the pilgrimage to Door County. In her way, Bonnie told me, “I’ve never met people like this before.” Together with my mother, Bonnie and I climbed the narrow steps to that simple upstairs room and stayed the night. We were recipients of a kind and gentle hospitality.

When I took my husband Jeff up to meet the Door County folks for the first time, his kind and open manner made him welcome from the start. He loved to meet the family I loved so dearly, and they welcomed him with kindness. Jeff gets excited about a lot of things – which is fun (but can be exhausting). Together with Auntie Edna and Uncle Werner, Auntie Irene and Uncle Erdreich, we went to take a look at the cabin that Werner used to house seasonal workers who came from the city to pick cherries every summer in his orchard. We walked through tall grass to the frame house, following one another on a narrow path. As we approached the house, Jeff was saying: “this is great! “

Behind me as we walked along the narrow path to the house, I heard Auntie Irene say, under her breath: “I feel sorry for Mary Elyn.” I can still hear her voice, saying out loud only to herself what she was really thinking…

I was hospitalized in the summer of 1996. Before Jeff and I had made the trip back to Wisconsin, I’d written a note to my beloved Auntie Irene, who was ill and in a care home. “Wait for me,” I’d written. When Jeff and I and my mother made it to Door County, Irene had already passed. I sat with the others in the narrow wooden pews of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. After the funeral, I stood on the steps of the church, looking over the heads of my Bahlert cousins, some of whom I had not seen for many years. I remembered what I’d written in my note to Auntie Irene. Auntie Irene had waited. And I had returned, just in time, as it turned out.

Irene Bahlert, circa 1923

memories, nostalgia, The Holy, Uncategorized

A dream

May 18, 2026May 18, 2026 Mary Elyn Bahlert

My dad loved life. He loved my mother, he loved us, and he loved his life. After having been diagnosed with colon cancer in the year after he retired from his work as a steelworker at age 65, he was always grateful for the life he was able to live during the 10 years after. He came to realize that he could live much as he had before the arrival of the cancer, and so he returned as much as possible to the life he’d had before the cancer diagnosis and the colonoscopy. He rode his bike all around his neighborhood in Milwaukee, and he and Mom drove clear across the country from Wisconsin to visit my mother’s brothers in California. Mom and Dad enjoyed every moment of that trip, my father at the wheel, my mother pointing out sites and reading from the AAA trip-tick that guided their trip. Both my parents – my father had an eighth grade education in a country one-room school house, my mother had received her GED when I was in college – were interested in life. As I remember them, I count the quality of having an interest in life as important, not only to them, but to me, as well. I’m grateful.

My dad loved life. He spent many weeks in a hospital bed at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Milwaukee, knowing he would not leave that room – ever. More than anything, he missed being able to ride his bike, especially now that spring was coming to the Midwest; it was April. He was 75; he would never make it to his 76th birthday. Now that I’m 76, I think of that fact – often.

Before I left his hospital room for the last time, before I traveled back to Pleasanton, California, where Jeff and I lived, I said to Dad: “Let me know you are all right.” I was clear: after he passed, I wanted a sign from him. As I said those words to Dad, he didn’t speak. He nodded. He understood.

The dream came some time later, months after Dad died in April of 1986. It was a simple dream, a clear dream. I saw my Dad, dressed in a suit, standing with a group of people, looking away from me. He had a humble look on his face as he stood with the others, his hands held together in a simple gesture, below his waist.

When I awoke, I knew immediately that Dad had kept his promise. He had come to me. And he had let me know that he was all right.