Sunday, Leivi

Awakened by church bells to a morning gray and silver, a morning different from all others though morning is always the same. Olive hillsides, mist. Rain chatters on the plastic corrugated cover of the deck outside our room's stone walls in a small overnight town. The narrow road curves against the hillside. Each bend reveals a home, a field, an orchard. Stucco, vine, and always stone, a landscape rolling toward the horizon and the imagined sea. In the town café, locals are gathered over coffee. Their voices drop when we enter. We order coffees, take a table in the back.

Later, the windshield wipers keep their own time. The rain stops, the morning continues and I understand how "soundless" is different from silence, how rain causes ink to bleed, how I will never be as old as these stones.

Family Album, II

* * *

My Swedish grandmother, dad's mom, is orphaned in Chicago. A childless Swedish couple from church takes her in. Grandma believes they adopt her. They do not; she works as their servant.

* * *

At sixteen, Grandma S. gets a job with Sears and Roebuck, one of their first female employees. On the other side of the family, a great-uncle receives, then sends back, a mail-order bride. Family members everywhere dream Christmas wishes, put the old Sears catalogs in their outhouses.

* * *

Grandpa S., Daddy's daddy, an auctioneer and a circuit judge, rides the county on his horse, dabbles in real estate. Bankrupt in the Depression, the family leaves Tennessee for California where Grandpa has been offered work on a family friend's ranch. Years later, I am four years old. Grandpa sits me in front of him on his horse named Dixie, calls me Sassafras.