So much for the empty nest.
Last month, I was contemplating life alone in my four-bedroom house. My oldest daughter stayed in Northern California after college, my middle child had just moved into her own apartment, and my baby was nine months away from high school graduation and planning to attend college anywhere but here.
This month it seems I can't get rid of them. A job transfer brought the eldest back. And the middle one stops by the house every evening for a free dinner and my coin-free washer and dryer.
Now I'm being crowded by three young women spreading their stuff around instead of spreading their wings.
Yet I'm happy enough about my full house to wonder: How will I cope when I really do have an empty nest?
Enter Florence Anderson -- Aunt Tiny to her family and friends.
She never had children and lost her husband 20 years ago, after a marriage that lasted for 45 years. She's made living alone an adventure and an art, and she's still got a lot on her "to do" list.
And she's been at it for more than a century.
I visited Aunt Tiny as a favor to a friend, Joyce Hurley, who said her 101-year-old aunt enjoys my column and is an avid Times reader.
When I drove Friday to her home in Torrance, at the Villa Sorrento retirement community, I figured I'd find someone frail, confused, in need of patient handling.
Aunt Tiny was waiting in the lobby to walk me to her room, her only concession to old age a recently acquired cane. "I do fine on the carpet," she told me, stepping briskly past the dining room, beauty salon and music center, "but the tile floors can get slippery."
We spent the next two hours flipping through her scrapbooks and photo albums. I can't cover 100 years in a newspaper column, so here's the Cliffs Notes version:
Florence Riley was born in Baton Rouge, La., in 1906, the daughter of a railroad worker. She became a teacher right out of high school and earned her college degree during summers. She was studying at Tuskegee Institute when she met and married a Tuskegee Airman.
"All the young women went to Tuskegee at the time to try to meet one of those fine young men," she told me. Her fine young man, James Anderson, was 13 years younger than she, and from Los Angeles.
They moved here after World War II and built a house in Pasadena. He was an accountant, she a social worker.
In their free time, they traveled the world -- Mexico, Canada, England, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Switzerland.
