It is difficult for me to say, with any degree of certainty or accuracy, exactly when I might have first begun to consciously perceive that my Auntie Claire was anything more than just the generic entity I had always known as my Mother’s sister. Certainly, my earliest perceptions and recollections of her were distinctly platonic and familial. We were never especially close, she and my Uncle Charles lived several hundred miles away and, in my formative years, our families visited only once or twice a year. In my youth,