#34 Tuberculosis is Back

by Jean Berrett

“Tuberculosis is back,” the headline says, and so I remember Aunt Grace whose husband died quite young of it back in the early 1930’s. Grace, who was named so because she was born on Christmas Eve. Grace, whose hair was always white. Even as a child, I remembered it so. Grace, who except for her ready and riotous laugh, I never, ever knew. Grace who now in her eighties, cries for my dying grandmother, herself still alive at 94, somehow still beautiful. And all of the puzzles of my childhood lie on the soil and grow like ragged, matted grass around that old, old house I had visited so often where all of them once lived. Their brother, Uncle Forest, tall and laughing and slapping his thigh, and then re-lighting his cigar. His brother, Uncle Marion, so different, small and quiet and humorless, whispering to me off to the side those stories of the Klan. My childish earth, first lights and darks, is grass still growing ragged around that old, old house where all of them had grown mature and ended their mysterious childhoods.