“Girls, clean this room. Erin, you should know better.” Karin was popping her head in, observing our mess.

Erin chirped a “yes ma’am,” and began throwing toys into a chest.
 

  I moved from my position on the bed to help, and I looked up to meet my aunt’s angry gaze. My eyes trail up a leg and then a torso. I followed up the arm that wraps around the door up her neck. The door closed and was back in the car staring down a dirt road.
   

Her face. I just can’t remember her face.
   

We had just passed the cross, a little pink shape constructed from thin planks of wood. The only symbol to show that something happened there. Karin deserves better. More than a cross that blows away every time a car slips by.
   

My Aunt Karin was the best lady I knew, or maybe that’s just what people have told me. Either way I know it’s true. She was genuine. A gold hearted angel of God. A woman with so much love in her heart, her chest must have ached from the pressure. A woman whose laugh held the power to save. And a woman that you couldn’t help but flock to, breaking open in complete submission of all the darkness within yourself, because She. Was. Light.
   

It was an evening in early October, when my mother rounded up my brother and me. I was merely four years old. She was barely able to let the words escape her mouth before she and my older sibling fell into a mess of tears.

    Karin was dead.
    She was gone.
    Car crash.
     Died instantly.

    I watched my family sob, but I didn’t cry. I couldn’t find it within myself to shed even one tear. To me death meant nothing. If I had known at the time, that I would never get to have another conversation with her, that I would never get to really get to know her, that our relationship would never have any real depth, then I would have cried. I would have bawled along with the others. Or maybe I wouldn’t have. After all, at the time of it I was only a child, and those things held no meaning to me.

Karin had been on the way to The Farm. A small piece of land that my grandpa poured his whole life into. Literally. I don’t remember why it was always referred to as “The Farm,” but I believe it’s because of the wind. The silence in the breeze was sweet enough to bring tears rushing to your eyes even if you had nothing to cry about. I like to think that the wind is Karin’s spirit rushing past your face as a subtle “Hello.”

    The Farm is where we met the day after the accident. Some of my other aunts and a few of their husbands went out to view the scene of where it all happened.

“You can still see pieces of her out there on the ground,” One of my married-in uncles had said after returning.

   He was never asked back to The Farm.
   He was worthless anyway.

   My whole family went to the funeral. Everyone except for me. I wasn’t allowed to, for no one thought I could handle it. I had begged my mother though, unable to grasp the concept that she was seeing Karin’s body, not Karin herself. I remember my mom coming home afterwards, streams of tears had stained her face. She hugged me, a long hard hug. It was an apology. My mom was saying sorry for the loss of one I had loved so dearly. Saying sorry that I would never get to fully understand my aunt’s beauty.

Edgar Allan Poe once stated,”The death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.” Karin was born of the breath it took to speak those words.

   “We have cereal,” she said walking to the cupboard.
    “I love cereal,” I said. My smile could not have stretched any farther across my childish face. I watched the bowl be placed in front of me and heard the clinking as it filled with sugary circles. I watched her arm pull away, drawing close to her body.
      My eyes drifted up her torso.
      Then her neck.
      I saw the ends of her hair, but where her face should have been was just the familiar sight of the old dirt road leading out to The Farm.