It was an early afternoon in spring when I sallied out to visit my dear niece Sandy.  My eldest sister's eldest child, Sandy is only a few years younger than I and long happily married.  Six times now has she celebrated her right to the title "Mother".  Her husband was out of town on business and I presented myself in the hope that I might be of service.

The four older children, Eldest Son, Eldest Daughter, Older Schoolgirl, and Younger Schoolgirl, had yet to return from the halls of academia, leaving only Toddler Boy Child and Baby Girl to vie for my auntly attentions.  They all have names, of course, but who can remember them?

Baby Girl sat in her carrier, a tiny study in pink and white innocence.  Fine, dark hair curled into soft tendrils around her little face.  Her eyes were sleepy, her cheeks flushed against the white cotton receiving blanket.  I gathered her up and she snuggled against me and allowed me to hold her bottle for her and rock her gently.

As delightful as these simple tasks for which Spinster Aunties are qualified can be, they do not last forever.  By and by, fighting sleep perhaps, she grew fussy.  I offered her an animal cracker, but she merely gummed it and smeared it into her hair.  She was also beginning to smell rather alarming and so, conceding defeat, I took her to her mother.

Sandy was sitting at the kitchen table balancing her checkbook.  She looked up briefly.  "She needs a diaper.  They're on the dryer."

I dutifully fetched a diaper and took diaper and child back to Mother.

"You can't change a diaper?"

"I am but a poor, childless spinster auntie with no understanding of these nurturing tasks."

"You could learn," she observed, giving me a long, level look.

I gave it back.  "I would so hate to diaper the wrong end of the baby."

With a snort Sandy took Baby Girl and the diaper.  Sensible that the sacred bond between a mother and daughter sometimes requires privacy, I hastily repaired to the living room to entertain Toddler Boy Child.

Toddler Boy Child is at that charming age when children are learning to walk and to talk, and so begin to appreciate the wonders the world has to offer.  This seems to me the perfect time to encourage the development of musical and artistic talents, so I searched the capacious pockets of my sweater and presented him with a kazoo.  By the time Sandy crossed through the living room on her way to put Baby Girl down for a nap, he and I had made an excellent start on Mary Had A Little Lamb.  It wasn't perfect yet, but for a two-year-old it wasn't bad, and I have no doubt it will improve when he learns to do more than one note.

Sandy gave me an evil look.  "Have babies, Annie!  Please have babies!"

"Alas!" I told her.  "Would that it could be!  But I am but a poor spinster . . . "

"Oh, shut up!"  She stomped into the bedroom.

Before me Toddler Boy Child took the kazoo from his mouth and banged it on the coffee table.  "Sam itch!" he shouted.

"You itch, Sam?"

"William!" Sandy shouted.  "His name is WILLIAM!  He wants a sandwich!  Peanut butter.  I don't suppose you could manage that?"

"Ah!" I nodded to Toddler Boy Child.  "Sammich!"  I rose with some dignity.  "Yes, I think I can manage to make a sandwich.  Spinster aunties eat sammiches too, you know."

Toddler Boy Child and I repaired to the kitchen.  I took out a slice of bread and slathered on a thick layer of peanut butter.  "Would you like anything else on it?  Jelly?  Bananas?"

Sandy shouted from the bedroom, "just peanut butter.  He only likes peanut butter."  It's an odd fact that no matter where Sandy is in the house she can hear you.  It might have been that the kitchen was bugged, but personally I suspect Sandy has bat blood.  "Just give him a half sandwich.  He won't eat a whole one.  Don't butter the wrong side of the bread!"

I replied to that with the silence it deserved and continued my discussion with Toddler Boy Child.  "Ketchup?  Pickles?  Cabbages?"  He answered me with the solemn stare that small children reserve for silly adults.  I found a sharp knife and cut the bread in two, then put the slices together.  It was a lovely sammich, two triangles of thin white bread separated by a good inch of peanut butter.  I handed it down to Toddler Boy Child and he clenched it in both fists and took a massive bite, smacking his lips appreciatively.  Peanut butter oozed out between his fingers, stretched from ear to ear and stuck to his hair.  Leaving him to his repast I returned to the living room to greet Older Schoolgirl and Younger Schoolgirl, just home from their pursuit of lower education.

Older Schoolgirl had discovered Toddler Boy Child's discarded kazoo.  Toddler germs notwithstanding she stuck it in her mouth and attempted something unidentifiable but obviously more ambitious than Mary Had A Little Lamb.  Younger Schoolgirl peered up at me with tragic dark eyes and indicated said kazoo.

"Auntie Annie, I didn't get one of those."

I sat on the sofa and put an arm around her.  "I know sweetheart," I said.  "I'm sorry, but I only brought one kazoo and I already gave that to your little brother."  She sniffled, tears forming even as her lower lip trembled.  "I thought you girls might like something a bit more grown up," I told her.

She looked up quickly, hopeful now, and her sister put down the kazoo and came over as well.  I found my tote bag beside the couch and dug inside.  "Now, I only brought one of each of these, so either you can share or else perhaps you'd like to engage in a round of Greco-Roman wrestling to decide who gets to pick first."

"We can share," Older Schoolgirl reassured me eagerly and Younger Schoolgirl nodded in accord, happy now.  Toys are nice, after all, but what really matters is that one has not been forgotten.

The first thing I took from the bag was a modeling clay set.  "Do you like modeling clay?  You know, this is also a very educational toy.  You can use it to learn about things like textures.  What you can do, you see, is press the clay into things, like the carpet and the drapes and your mother's lacy panties, and then peel it off to see what the textures are like."

They took it, heads bent together to study it, and I reached back in and brought out a large kit.

"Ooh!" Younger Schoolgirl breathed.  "Sand art!  We wanted sand art, but mommy said no!"

"Did she?"  I patted the little head.  "She was probably afraid that you'd lose all the sand.  Just play with it in the middle of her bed.  It's bigger than your bed and that way the sheets will catch the sand.  But don't play with those things until Auntie goes home."

"Why not?"

"Because," I said, gathering them close, "I don't see you very often and I'd like you to stay here and talk to me."

Ever amenable, they stacked their new acquisitions on the coffee table and sat beside me.  I draped the now-empty tote bag over the modeling clay and sand art, hiding them from the casual view of anyone who might happen to pass through the room, put an arm around each girl and said, "So!  What shall we talk about?"

The two children glanced at one another.  They are very close in age and temperament and seldom need anything so mundane as words to communicate with one another.

"Aunt Annie," Older Schoolgirl said, "will you tell us where babies come from?"

I considered.  "You know, I once asked my mother that very same question.  She told me to think about it, so I do.  I think that now I have it figured out and I will certainly be more than happy to enlighten you.

"Where babies come from generally depends on where they're born.  Most babies that are born east of the Mississippi -- you've studied the Mississippi?  The big river that runs down the middle of the country?"

They agreed that they had, bright children!

"Well, most babies that are born east of the Mississippi come from an enormous plant in New Bedford, Massachusetts.  It's the oldest plant in the New World and goes back to pre-Revolutionary times.  You've studied the Revolution?"

Again they agreed that they had.

"Well, before this plant was built baby-making was a cottage industry.  That is, people put them together at home like the quilts and stuffed animals you see at craft shows.  The problem was that the quality wasn't uniform, so sometimes you'd get really beautiful babies but sometimes you'd get ones with their arms different lengths or their ears on crooked.  So they built this plant in the early seventeen hundreds and it supplied all the babies in the United States.  As the country grew, the plant grew and it still makes all the babies in the eastern half of the country today.

"As people started moving west, though, it got to be harder and harder for them to get babies.  Remember, transportation was very slow back then and shipping was a problem.  Some babies weren't being born until they were three or four years old!  That's when they started building new plants out west.  There were as many as a dozen once, but a lot of them went out of business and now there are only three, all huge but none of them anywhere near as massive as the one in Massachusetts.  They're in Boise, Idaho; Mesa Verde, New Mexico; and Carson, California."

"And that's where all the babies come from?" Older Schoolgirl asked, tipping her head as she absorbed the information.

"Well, almost all.  Once in a long while you'll still find a crafter who makes their own, and sometimes hospitals up north will accidentally get a baby shipped from the big Canadian plant in Calgary.  You can always tell a baby from Calgary, though, because there's a glitch in their language programming that makes them say 'eh?' at the end of every sentence."

Younger Schoolgirl tugged at my sleeve.  "How do we know which plant we came from?"

"You have to look for your maker's mark.  They use invisible ink now that only shows up under a black light -- you know, like when you go to the amusement park and they stamp your hand?  But I think when you were born they were still using regular ink.  It's not totally waterproof, though, so it might have washed off by now."

"Well, where did they put it?"

"I don't know.  It could be almost anywhere.  Usually it'll be on the bottom of your foot or else on your back somewhere -- your heel or the back of your neck or maybe even on your butt.  It depends on how you were lying on the conveyor belt when you went through the stamping machine."

At this point Sandy returned and looked around in dismay.  "Where's William?"

"Who?" I asked her.

"William!"

"Who?"

"That little kid you just made a sandwich for!"

"Oh, Sam!  You know, Sandy, it worries me that you can't keep your children straight."

She growled at me and shouted,  "Where is he?"

I glanced around.  "I don't know.  He can't have gone far.  Just follow the trail of peanut butter.  He's bound to be at the end of it."

Sandy put her hands in the air and turned away, calling over her shoulder, "come on, girls!  Help me find your little brother!"

The schoolgirls cheerfully joined in the search.  Older Schoolgirl looked behind the sofa cushions while Younger Schoolgirl peered suspiciously down the heating vent.

Obviously toddlers are more flexible than I give them credit for.

Since no one else was following my excellent advice I did so myself.  The trail began in the kitchen with a glop of peanut butter on the floor.  There was another, smaller spatter a couple of feet away and a sticky brown handprint on the doorjamb of the door into the back hall.  From this point he had trailed his hand, or possibly his sandwich, along the wallpaper for several feet until he reached the back hall closet, where a peanut-scented smudge on the edge of the door betrayed his passage.  I peered into the dim recesses of the closet and a pair of bright black eyes peered back at me, assuring me that I had located either Toddler Boy Child or a rat of truly alarming proportions.

I motioned to him firmly and he obediently crawled out into the light.  His stay in the closet had left him covered in soft grey dust and cobwebs.  He still held the gooey, damp, half-masticated remains of his sandwich, now garnished with the desiccated body of a daddy longlegs.  I shook my head at him sadly.

"If you wanted spiders on your sandwich you should have said so when I was making it for you!"  I gingerly took the lump of erstwhile foodstuff from his hands and dropped it into the trash, whereupon he tipped back his head, opened his mouth far wider than one would suppose a toddler's mouth was capable of and emitted a sound reminiscent of fire engines arriving at a three-alarm blaze.

As he cried his nose ran and tears streamed down his face, lending a certain viscosity to the mixture of peanut butter, snot, slobber, dust and cobwebs with which he was covered.  In his grief he smeared his hands across his face and fisted his grubby little fingers in his hair.  From the miasma that surrounded him I can only suppose that he also filled his diaper.

I sent one of the schoolgirls out to fetch Sandy, who was searching frantically through the trash bags piled at the curb awaiting pickup.  Apparently she has long lived with the secret fear that someday someone would mistake one of her progeny for a crumpled piece of paper and inadvertently discard them.

Sandy came in with a rush and stopped in the doorway, her whole body broadcasting relief.  "William!  There you are!"

"Yes," I said.  "See?  Here Sam is!"  I found a very small clean spot in the middle of his back and used one finger to propel him towards her.  "I think he wants his mommy."

She scooped him up and kissed his cheek.  Motherly love is not only blind, it is also deaf and possesses an iron stomach and no sense of smell.  Auntly love is a more delicate thing and the auntly stomach roiled in protest.

"Good grief!" Sandy exclaimed, studying her son.  "How many jars of peanut butter did you put on that sandwich anyway?"

Perceiving this as sarcasm, I left the kitchen without deigning to reply.  The schoolgirls had disappeared but Baby Girl was fussing quietly in the bedroom so I went in to her.  Poor dear was lying naked in the middle of her bed, victim of a hurried strip search.  Obviously her sisters hadn't believed me about the ink being invisible now.  I sighed dispiritedly.

It is so sad when children doubt their elders!

Looking around to ensure there were no witnesses I fetched another diaper and dressed her again.  She was still sleepy and, once she was warm again and had had her bottle restored to her, she drifted back to sleep in no time.  I lay her down gently and went out just in time to meet Eldest Girl Child returning home.

"Hi, Aunt Annie," she said.  "Don't you think I should get an eyebrow ring?"

"Certainly not!" I told her.  "I think you should get several eyebrow rings.  They always look so much better when you group them."

"Yes!"  She exclaimed.  "See, Mom!  Aunt Annie thinks --"

"I know," Sandy shouted back.  "Evil thoughts!  And she thinks them constantly!  The answer is still no.  Whatever the question is, the answer is no!  In fact, it's even more no now than it was before your Aunt Annie weighed in on the subject!"

"So," I commented mildly, "she doesn't mind then if you get a tattoo?"

Eldest Girl Child grinned and opened her mouth but Sandy's bat blood was at full boil.  "I heard that!  It's not going to work!"

"This place is so unfair," Eldest Girl Child complained, frowning fiercely.  She located the phone, applied it to the side of her head and stormed off up the stairs.

Sandy came back through the living room carrying Sam -- at last!  A child whose name I can remember! He was clean now, sopping wet, stark naked and apparently much happier that way.  Elder Schoolgirl had reappeared in the hallway and Sandy stopped to watch her.

She was standing with her back to the full-length hall mirror.  She dropped her britches down around her knees, bent over and did her best to peer between her legs at her own bare backside.

"What are you doing?" her mother asked.

"Looking for Boise," she replied matter of factly.

Sandy glared at me, eyes narrowed suspiciously.  I shrugged innocently and gave her a bland look in reply.

"Okay . . . well . . . good luck with that," Sandy answered finally.  Going around her daughter she headed upstairs.  Younger Schoolgirl was also, presumably, upstairs and the modeling clay and sand art had disappeared with her.

A wise relative knows when a home is open to the extended family and when it is time to withdraw and leave the smaller unit to enjoy one another's companionship in peace.  Realizing that the time had come to end my visit, I called out a hurried farewell and left via the front door.

In the driveway I found Eldest Boy Child working on the heap of pre-Columbian rust and chrome polish he optimistically calls a "truck".  I paused long enough to greet him.

"How many illegitimate children do you have now?"

He admitted that as yet he had none.

"I think you're being very selfish," I told him.  "Think of your poor, dear mother!  She's well on her way to forty.  You don't want her to enter her dotage without the comfort of grandchildren do you?"

As if summoned by the mention of her name, Sandy bellowed at me from the second-story window.  Looking up at her I waved cheerfully and blew her a kiss.  "Alas!  Parting is such sweet sorrow!  But don't despair!  I'll come back soon.  It is, after all, the least I can do, as a poor, childless spinster, to help you with your blessed burden!"

She waved back at me, quite forgetting to unclench her fist.  I waved back one last time, climbed into my little car and returned to my humble abode, happy in the knowledge of a day well spent.

The End.