CROOKED HOUSE
She seemed like a fragile flower, petrified as though she had inhaled the dust of late-summer’s drought, the summer my mother came home. By then our two-flat felt like a crooked house, three generations listing, top-heavy with age and infirmity. At the window she dozed and tilted in her chair, wheels locked. I learned to slide out the front door unnoticed, happily avoiding her impossible gaze. Vigilant on my tricycle with the big front wheel, I traveled the neighborhood. My uniform, a babushka and a too-big leather bomber jacket, I patrolled Francisco Avenue to Devon and back up. I scoured backyards, houses, alleys and gangways inspecting people. Years later someone asked me, “What is the silence of loss?” I said, “I am still the passerby, head down, studying the cracked pavement, wondering if it will withstand the guttural din of the delivery trucks, smashing their way down this narrow alleyway.
(This is a retake of a story that, for me, is travelling a road, with no end in sight.)
asheville artists, family, family history, poetry, prose poetry, wnc poetry, women arts
Holly Iglesias
I recognize this, Jean, and am heartened to know that you are staying with that endless road. Clearly it has endless resonance and continuing revelations.
I also appreciaed the description in the other piece about your godfather and the way you used the idea of “twain,” the bulwark between generations.
Tina Barr
This is quite remarkable in terms of the power of the atmosphere created here, in such a short space. Poignant, evocative, never sentimental, ….that bomber jacket….you create a “character” or “self”—–so well.
Zoe Nicholie
Those first two sentences say SO much. Exquisite pain, yet so resilient it gives me hope. And I love the image of the babushka and bomber jacket!!