Airbell

I have a mental image of something I never witnessed but now know occurred— my mother cleaning the “mud room” of my grandparents’ house after her step-father’s suicide (the room where his locked roll-top writing desk sat), sparing her half-sisters and mother the experience. I think about how she grew up in that family as the remnant of her mother’s previous marriage. The details of her parents divorce seemed sordid— my grandmother had carried on an affair and left my biological grandfather Milton for his foreman Bob at the construction firm he worked for. As a result my grandmother had ascended in class—but the costs to her were high. In early 1950’s Texas, adultery was a criminal matter. My mother remembers the police being involved when my grandmother’s affair was discovered. My grandmother was a practicing Catholic as well, and the subsequent divorce and remarriage resulted in her being denied communion for decades. This is the context my mother pulled into the act of scrubbing the mudroom floor, and it informs how she was oriented towards that space.