At ninety my grandmother begins
to recount stories we had never heard.
How her mother screamed when Ann
was born, at home, no drugs, and
my Mimi whimpered at nine, brave
enough to hide it all these years.
I always knew that she, the oldest,
was responsible and linked by duty
to a woman who was unsafe by
our standards, sad and lonely, who made
great stuffing and biscuits. Mimi
has lost her baking at ninety but still
pays tribute to her mother, who
(we now learn) buried a fetus
in a shoebox, made her eldest help
and promise not to tell the other six,
a promise Mimi kept to her death.
The miscarriage, the blood, who knows
how far along she was but not
too far—enough to deliver
something dead, at home, no drugs,
and handle it. Like Mimi has always
handled things, like each of us, a line
of the oldest, responsible, and tied
in some way to women stringing back
who screamed, bore children, made biscuits.
My child bounds in my womb,
a daughter, a promise. What will I say
at ninety, that she will scratch down
in the morning, things I have hidden
now flushed into light by my own
aging and leaving, my desire to live
in the stories I tell.
1 comment:
I have been thinking a lot lately about my mother's mother (my grandma, Mimi). She lived to be 96, and suffered from Alzheimer's at the end of her life. My own mother is an only child; I was with her a lot in the process of losing her mother.
Mimi kept pumpkin cookies in her freezer all the time, wonderful little cakey things, sometimes with raisins, often with brown sugar icing. When I went to college, she used to send me small boxes of pumpkin cookies. I made them for Mom this past weekend for her birthday, and they were delicious bites of fall time and memories.
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