Legacy
It was raining whenever my grandparents visited my great-grandfather. Shrubs bloomed pink, white and purple. Everything glistened, and the magic of the cut glass doorknob which felt too sharp for my hand opened into a house close, they used to call it, with air from the 1930’s, sour dish cloths, vinegar and Lemon Pledge. Grandpa Tinney was tall and imposing, frightening and compelling, like a ride you’re afraid to go on. He sat in his big easy chair by the front window. Doilies on the head rest and arms. I sat on his lap. With his ballpoint pen he drew on my hands, elaborate swirls that became monsters and places, maps. He took requests. Sometimes designs went up my arms. My grandmother yelled at me when I drew on my hands, but against her father, she was powerless. The night I stayed there, I went to bed when it was still light. I felt like a piece of cheese tucked into a sandwich. Smell of lilacs though the window wasn’t open. His house was completely quiet except for the grandmother clock in the living room, which softly marked the quarter hours. Wooden floors. Glass doors. I could hear Grandpa Tinney snoring. His face was immovable; he was a banker, a real estate agent, the mayor. He was the Civil Defense Warden during the Great Wars. He was active in the Ku Klux Klan. I didn’t know what that was, so he wasn’t ruined for me yet.
~
UNCLE BUD
Summer Cousins
Five girls camped in the playhouse by the lake. We sank boats and pretended we were drowning. We ran everywhere. We played kickball, hide’n’seek, and when it rained, Monopoly. We snatched blackened hot dogs forgotten on the grill then burned ourselves with sparklers, happy hiss in the bucket. We never changed our clothes. We bathed in the lake like raccoons. Lumpy with bug bites, grit in our hair, we collapsed in sleeping bags that smelled like attic and sour hay. No one was old enough to snore. And if my dad was there in the morning, we could eat pancakes with our fingers because he understood we were still animals.
Winter Cousins
I wanted to know my dad well enough to call him Uncle Bud like my winter cousins did. They knew so much more about him than I did. My cousins knew his house, his hill, his pond, where he kept the keys to the snowmobiles and beer refrigerator, how to tilt the slot machine. I only knew what was left in his drawer at the cottage: faded swim trunks with orange flamingos, a pack of Newports, a lighter, a brittle stick of Wintergreen gum. What they didn’t know was how he looked sleeping on Gran’s couch during his monthly visits to us, resting up to be Uncle Bud.
~
Elizabeth Kerlikowske teaches Ekphrastic Writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. She is an activist for the arts. Her work has been recently published in New Verse News, Passager, and Dunes Review.