tu es ma lune de miel,
on the verge:
my mother and i visited my grandparents today in their white-walled single room cramped with too many memories and people that don't know their own pasts. there is only a blue vase holding bluer chrysanthemums that makes the room tolerable. my nannie persists that she needs a ride home to a house that was torn down and replaced by a commercial district twenty-nine years ago. she needs to find a way back to her mother who passed in nineteen seventy-six and her father who has been gone since she was eleven. my great-grandmother was nora grogan smith. i am a reminder of impossible things. she wore lipstick today for the first time since they've been there and i was glad to have the pink to focus on rather than the glassy bewilderment that her glasses don't conceal. my grandaddy loves her. she says they're not really living together. they sleep side-by-side fully dressed every night after having been married for fifty-seven years. she thinks he's married to someone else: jane truchan. she only answers to jane smith.
i found her scrapbook from mary washington college, 1936. there are girls named marjorie and miriam in knee-length tweed coats and mary-janes wearing lipstick and pin curls, and she still remembers them. they are pieces of americana on yellowed pages in a leather-bound book that she keeps under her arm chair. they are beautiful and withering away in assisted-living homes forgetting the loves of their lives, the white houses with green shudders that they called home, and what they had for breakfast. my grandaddy cried as she recounted her history minus him.
and i lose my evening with the boy version of me and banter over vanilla cokes served by a girl i used to know. she's eighteen and engaged to a boy that also works at denny's. she wants to move, but she doesn't look ambitious when she says it. the night is "we'll be brilliant, together" as my mind jumps elsewhere: i am a girl from too far away to matter, while he writes about some woman's lips in his fictional little way.
my mother and i visited my grandparents today in their white-walled single room cramped with too many memories and people that don't know their own pasts. there is only a blue vase holding bluer chrysanthemums that makes the room tolerable. my nannie persists that she needs a ride home to a house that was torn down and replaced by a commercial district twenty-nine years ago. she needs to find a way back to her mother who passed in nineteen seventy-six and her father who has been gone since she was eleven. my great-grandmother was nora grogan smith. i am a reminder of impossible things. she wore lipstick today for the first time since they've been there and i was glad to have the pink to focus on rather than the glassy bewilderment that her glasses don't conceal. my grandaddy loves her. she says they're not really living together. they sleep side-by-side fully dressed every night after having been married for fifty-seven years. she thinks he's married to someone else: jane truchan. she only answers to jane smith.
i found her scrapbook from mary washington college, 1936. there are girls named marjorie and miriam in knee-length tweed coats and mary-janes wearing lipstick and pin curls, and she still remembers them. they are pieces of americana on yellowed pages in a leather-bound book that she keeps under her arm chair. they are beautiful and withering away in assisted-living homes forgetting the loves of their lives, the white houses with green shudders that they called home, and what they had for breakfast. my grandaddy cried as she recounted her history minus him.
and i lose my evening with the boy version of me and banter over vanilla cokes served by a girl i used to know. she's eighteen and engaged to a boy that also works at denny's. she wants to move, but she doesn't look ambitious when she says it. the night is "we'll be brilliant, together" as my mind jumps elsewhere: i am a girl from too far away to matter, while he writes about some woman's lips in his fictional little way.