What do skunks, bankers, and politicians have in common?

My Great Aunt Anzie had opinions of all three.

In the wisdom of Aunt Anzie, skunks stink. Don’t be foolish, she would say. Run when you see a raised striped tail. In the opposite direction! Failure to do so will deplete your supply of canned tomato juice for the year.

My aunt had an opinion of politicians. She said more than once that if a politician genuinely served the people, they would not become wealthy and would be there only temporarily. They would remember where they came from and how they got there. And when they forgot that fact, they should be “unelected.” They would do their duty and come home to tend their farm. She saw politicians as “servants of the public.” Can you imagine what she would think these days?

And I learned from her the importance of staying out of debt and never being a borrower. A daily Bible reader, she quoted Proverb 22:7 when it came to bankers, “The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”

However, she was a generous woman, often giving the last of her weekly food allowance to the hobos that frequented her modest home and the “Elder House” on White Street in Princeton, Kentucky.

Again, as a student of the Bible, she noted, “Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back.” Luke 6:30.

I learned much from her as I sat on the porch of the Elder House in the late summer afternoons.

My Great Aunt Anzie was born in January 1883, the same month Thomas Edison installed the first electric lighting system using overhead wires in Roselle, New Jersey. Aunt Anzie would not experience electricity in rural Kentucky until 1937.

She was the daughter of James Henry Gunther and Martha Watson.

She passed on the 4^th of September 1970.