She would be 93 years old now. I can still see her soft, pale complexion, her feathery white hair, those circular steel-rimmed glasses that earned her the nickname "Owl." I can still feel the cold ocean air circulating rhrough her old island home, and her faint clear voice calling me.

She sent me letters on my birthday and Christmas, for Easter and Saint Patrick's Day, for Arbor Day and Groundhog Day. A card came even for the Feast of Saint Swithins one year. Somehow, though I know a dozen closer relatives must have preempted me in her mind, the soft, familiar tone of her writing always comforted me. She seemed in these messages to devote herself only to me -- to congratulate, to wish good luck, to offer support to me alone.

She gave me literature: a rabbit named Peter, the elephant Babar, Frog and Toad, Madeline, Little Bear, even Badger and Mole. She gave me Little Whale, the beluga that still lies on the shelf behind my bed, the one stuffed animal I'd take with me everywhere. Dozens of owls from her collection, in metal, clay, wood, glass, and stone, perch in a mottled line across the top of my bookshelves.

I remember the annual visits to the old wooden house on San Juan Island, where she lived until health problems forced her to take up residence in a nursing home. The dark, but in no way ominous walls; the cupboards replete with spices; the bellows and huge fireplace; the multitude of stones, some painted to resemble animals, others plain -- these memories are distant in time, but not in clarity.

When I was twelve, I wrote to ask questions about her life, and she responded with pages upon pages of detailed reminiscences from childhood: of the fairy place with a miniature waterfall and flower-spangled banks deep in the Ohio woods where she walked as a girl with her father; of the sunbeams, the moving leaf shadows, the tall hedge of lilacs, and the thicket of wild crabapple in the old family garden. These recollections she called "the Flotsam and Jetsam of Long Ago and Far Away."

If I could visit her again, we'd sit down at a table in her old home on San Juan Island, and I'd ask her to tell me more. Her life was like a deep sea chest, battered and worn on the outside, but holding a priceless treasure within. She needed people to look inside, to ask the questions that would reveal the stories she had to tell. If only I had taken the time to unlock her past, I might have been immeasurably enriched; I might have found some hidden key to myself in the family history that shaped me.

Looking back on the seventeen years I knew her, it sometimes seems as if I only knew of her. But I am grateful for the time we had together, the time she dedicated to me. My great-aunt Ebba, her love of animals, her love of books, her love of children, will always be with me.

This essay was written by Daniel Vaughan, Garfield Class of 1999, Harvey Mudd, Class of 2003.