a to b?

it's a circle, that's what they say but more

vortexish i believe. my grandfather was the writer

i think the only thing i inherited from him till i look 

at my son's widow's peak his lack of baldness he 

got some genie genes. i pull the memories out of the bucket

again, spread them over the bed. the years mix together

a stew of lion's club pins, crafted bumblebee pins, starbux pins

here's a worthless AS degree(occupational, as in this girl

studies just enough to be dangerous) and the text to the high

school play grandpa wrote and produced. in high school.

a newspaper clipping from 1975 of my great grandmother by marriage

 called a pioneer in her small town citing her involvement

in girl scouts and the order of the eastern star. i remember running

to her house when we visited the grands, she woudln't walk

the catty corner backyard to eat dinner with us but

we three girls always wanted to visit her. her house,

when she died, was located directly across the street from

the 2 storey with a sunroom where her and bio granddad

raised their blended family- two daughters and a son, her

two daughters and the baby girl to cement the union.  my grandmother

was the middle child of her father's first marriage. her mom

died in the influenza epidemic of 1912. we didn't know this,

she was always gramma mac to us and my grandmother

was the only one of the children to stay in the small town

where they were raised. she had a piano in her front room.

she never played it but sometimes she let one of us

lift the lid and finger the keys. we were her stepgrands

but we didn't know it. i never met her husband, he died before

i was born. i believe it was the two women's special hell

to be so close yet so far apart. my grandmother was not especially 

astute. her stepmom was a former teacher in the Northern states

and Canada, a Teacher's Normal College Graduate , Woman

of the Year in her small town five years before she died.  not

the kind of woman to suffer fools gladly. it explains why

a woman who had no other children nearby never attended her

step daughter's Sunday or Holiday dinners. as a child  i   

thought she was an invalid. we'd run the 2 large lawns to her place

and enter her stuffy house. 

if we were lucky we didn't have to eat the dry banana bread

left over from her children's visits, she'd break out a new one.

unwrap the foil, give us softened butter to spread' i should ask my dad

what happened between her and mom. i could ask my aunt

but i'm not talking to her. these copies of my grandad's

achievments in the club, the copied text of his play, all come from her.

after she died, she sent a copy of gramma's death certificate with

these random pictures. once this stupid woman took all the family

photgraphy books from the late 19th, early 20th century, bound together

in heavy bookboard, with explanations of the people of holds her 

and the history all in place and carefully pried all the phots out of it.

because she thought she could sell the books for more without them in it.

there is a copy of of the marriage announcement in 1937. my mother, 

born in 1939 holds her first daughter beside my sister with her only. 

a letter from a girl i knew in college demanding an answer slides onto the floor.

i don't know what to tell her. my grandpa's speech in underneath. i don't know what it was for but the woman who attended to gramma's estate thought i should have along with : a couch

china closet, dresser, bok case, metal desk, dishes, tv, pots and pans, while she has questions on

lamps, tv stand, microwave, little oven, dryer, tv tables,which will be taken care of at the time of death by the granddaughters, one of whom borrowed 4k and only paid back 1500 so that's coming out of the cash settlement which was how much again auntie? can we see the statements? no, not this photocopied mess that you sent when i refused to talk to you after you asked for the dressers back a year after she died when i was going through a divorce. "when can i come get them?" she asked. pretty much never, bitch. 

i suppose she'd love to share how much she knows about this woman, her and my mother's only grand. but i really don't care. she died a scant year before my sister and three years before my mom. why did she get to live so long? again, i think it was punishment. a fete whom no one feted. and here is a column from erma bombeck, good worked overtime to create mothers. and here are my wedding pictures from 30 years ago, with grandmother(who also was awarded woman of the year in the same small town as her mother, whom, she says, taught her to give back)and grandfather standing in their front yard under the bower of roses we rented for the apparently shotgun wedding, according to the man who asked for my hand for 5 years . he tore these pictures from the albums i left when i left him. i dunno. the wedding happened. my family was there. his was not. he had none worth asking and i didn't know why.12 crazier years later i found out how badly he was abused. i can't blame him, i can't hate who he was then. i thought i loved him when we married. we had two children. here is my son as a baby, here is our daughter playing ball, here are my parents in front of the washington monument the winter they had to leave my sister in intensive care to go get the first experimental treatments on mom's stage four melanoma, here is the poster my son made to protect our water, here's the first christmas on our own, me hugging my son and daughter, we're all smiling. the roommate who left four months later took the picture. i was left holding the rent. later a boyfriend burnt my apartment kitchen to cinders. my grandmother's buffet and the 100 year old rocking chair she gave me , both victims of a grease fire. i don't know what to do with the wedding pics. the old boyfriend popped up on friends' facebook today because i went looking. here's a pic of my baby girl crawling in our first house and here is a third cousin with a friend of my daughter's, a member of our girl scout troop, who overdosed when she was only 18, home for her granddad's funeral in her first year of college. here is my mom on the lawn of FSU in her first year, before she went back home and married daddy. here is my older sister in gramma mac's sunroom 8 months later. here is the letter from her bitch sister telling me she will be taking the furniture i moved from their dead mother's home, the home she insisted i come to while she and her husband took time off from their two weeks of caretaking her terminal mother. here i am, twenty years later taking that letter and wadding it up, picking up a lighter to set the grandmother blanket she sent me this easter on fire, picking up my phone to snap a pic an post it on facebook so the bitch can see how she treated me while i was GOING THRU a DIVORCE. here is my beautiful fifteen year old mom with her homely 8 year old sister, here are me and my college friend on a canoe on the hillsboro river, yes, she's flashing you, here is my former sister in law, who only escaped her abusive husband when he, the baby of six, died second. she taught me how to make banana bread. not my great grandmother. here is the first company dinner as a single. i brought my best friends.my son at six months and again at a year. here are me and older sister, 2 and 3 sharing a present in the front yard of the yellow house where i decided one halloween that i did not like tea.

a copy of player piano with disentegrating spine. the pages need to be reset. time exists all at once in this box . i wonder if the letters from my pedophile are still in that bag?