“Sisterly Squabbles”

A little weep, a little sigh,
a little teardrop in each eye.

Grandma Jane and her sister Sue,
one wanted one hole, the other, two

punched into their can of milk.
(All their squabbles were of this ilk.)

The rest, of course, is family fable.
They sat, chins trembling, at the table.

When my dad entered, we’ve all been told,
their milk-less coffee had grown cold.

For the W3 Challenge. this is the prompt: Two voices. Two perspectives. Tension lingers in the air. Can they find common ground? Will the conversation spark understanding or fracture further? You decide.Write a poem—any form, or none at all—that captures the heart of a difficult conversation.

My grandmother and her sister had a lifetime of such “differences.” It might have begun due to the events  revealed to me by my Aunt Stella, my grandmother’s daughter. Years after the deaths of both my grandmother and her sister,  I had asked my dad’s sister why there seemed to be so much antagonism between my grandmother and her sister, whom we called “Aunt Susie,” even though she was really our great aunt.  My Aunt Stella, a good church lady, revealed to me then what she thought was the crux of their antagonism.  My grandmother had, before my grandfather, been married to a different man whom she never ever mentioned to us, although her sister Margaret had mentioned him on occasion to us as *”That Black Devil!”  Grandma had one daughter with that husband, my Aunt Margie, but then divorced him and married my grandfather and had two more children, my father and my Aunt Stella, who told me the following tale.  It seems as though Aunt Susie once visited my grandmother and “The Black Devil” in their tiny one-bedroom house. When bedtime came, there was only one choice…one bed..and so of course they all three shared it.  “But, my  aunt said, unfortunately, my grandmother made the mistake of putting her husband in the middle and during the night, she woke up and found he and her sister were, well, um…they were having sexual intercourse!”  That was perhaps the only time in her life my Aunt Stella ever said those words and the fact that she told me was amazing.  No one else in my family had ever heard this story but we had surely all wondered why in that time when divorce was unheard of, my grandmother had chosen to divorce “That Black Devil.”  Years later, when I chose to go to a family reunion of my Aunt Margie’s family, all descendants of that “Black Devil,” (although I don’t think any of them ever met him since my Aunt Margie was raised by my grandmother and her second husband who had moved the family from Iowa to South Dakota) none of them had never heard the story, either. It certainly would explain, however, the lifetime of nit-picky bickering between my grandmother and her sister.

*  In calling my grandma’s first husband, “That Black Devil,” my Aunt Margaret was describing his soul as black, not his skin.