Mothers and Daughters
Four generations in one picture.
That’s Velma in the big chair. Arms crossed, stoic caution written on her tired face. She was always old, to me. Old lady hair, soft body shrouded in old lady shifts. Voice of a tentative crone, she would speak when spoken to. Or when delegating. Or calling us to meals. Always tending something, someone. She was somehow joyless, but always kind.
Nana, my mother’s mother’s mother. Matriarch.
She buried three babies and raised six children in the shadow of the wandering dandy she called a husband. The big old house on the dirt lane named for the family is as alive in my memory as she is. The house was her realm, all doilies and polish, cooking and scrubbing. The lilacs and the rabbit hutch, the pony next door and the scary relatives down the lane. I’ll only ever know it — know her — through a child’s eyes. And stories.
That’s Rosemary, daughter of Velma, sitting in the peach sweater, her serene face a lie. Genteel hellraiser, she abandoned her family — a husband and two small children — to run off with a Mexican playboy. She left her kids with Nana, who raised them, and she ran around wild and free in 1940's America, when such a thing was an unspeakable scandal. She finally brought the playboy back home to live a cloistered life for two, formal visits and holidays with her…
