My grandmother had three sisters. Grandma was the only one who ever married or had a child (my mother).
I only knew these women as little old ladies. When I knew them they were short, cardiganed, nearsighted, deaf, and drank objectively vile martinis.
"NEEDS MORE VERMOUTH!"
"WHAT?"
"IT. NEEDS. MORE. VERMOUTH!" [said no one since these women died]
They loved to play poker and bet on horse races and bake bread for my father, who adored them as much as they did him. They were like live-action fairy godmothers who gave strange crocheted gifts instead of wishes, and, unlike Grandma, did not have a house stocked with root beer and candy.
One was a nun. She entered the convent as a teenager in 1925, and became the president of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs for short) in the late '60s. She was a kind, brave, gracious, fiercely intelligent woman who said (paraphrasing) "I won't be their Mother Superior- they're grown women. I'll be the president instead." She abandoned the habit, and the sisters lived among the very poor people they served. She would send us weird nun-made gifts that screamed "I have not spent much time around playing children" (I had a nun doll in full black habit, with little black sensible shoes and a rosary on her tiny belt. When you're little it's hard to make up stories about a doll like that. Unless you're Irish, I guess.)
The other two sisters lived together their whole lives. One was a civilian staffer in the Navy, and when she retired in the '70s it was as the highest-ranking civilian woman in the US Navy organization.* I never knew what the other did for her career, but there were rumors of an exciting love life (with married men!), one of whom gave her a beautiful gold watch. We were not allowed to play with her jewelry.
It is my loss that I didn't know these women when I was an adult, but I have been able to glean something about them. The lived in conventional times, especially for women, but they refused to accept the constraints of whatever box they were in (and the Navy and the convent are serious containers of the human spirit), so they changed the boxes to reflect what they knew was right. They could not have looked more conventional, or been less. They were tiny, polite, funny, formidable, and effective. They were stealth before it was cool.
Nell is named after the nun. Some day I hope she'll forgive me for saddling her with a frumpy old label long enough to understand she was named for a superhero.
*edited because I got that wrong. It was the Navy, not the Army.