Never assume

No, never assume. What is right today, will most certainly be wrong at some point in the future. What is wrong right now, will stick around to be right later on. Even family..

The ease with which you may all get along, will one day shift, possibly drastically, and it will cause a rub -an itch behind your eyes. You'll scratch at it, carelessly, and suddenly all kinds of memories will tumble out of the corner of your mind, land prominent in your thoughts, and corrode your perceptions, eroding layers of superficiality and wallpapering, bringing favorite images into a new tint.. a new angle. Before you know it, you'll be frowning, unwillingly wondering at easy words an uncle once spoke.. or an aunt once mimed, from behind your mother's back.. and this silent sentence, perhaps not at all intended for your observation, was observed and coded in your young mind as something innocuous -until..

Never assume. Never think you're prepared. The mind is full of antique memories, dusty, dull, dormant. Nudged, one can drop from the shelf and-

Here. -You're thinking of flowers -and suddenly you've focused on the image of the ant on the petal of the yellow roses you noticed in a vase at your grandmother's. You were 6. But now, at an older, mature, long lived and wiser age, it suddenly snaps into focus that your grandmother never had flowers in the house thereafter. Ever. And suddenly, you're wondering 'why'?

Purposefully scratching that itch you remember that your grandmother had a vacation that particular year, the year you'd seen the ant. You remember, now, the tone in your mother's voice, when she responded to your question of wanting to visit her again -the tone, now placeable as 'context', which makes you shudder. The tone of unease; not short, not angered, not demeaning -no - just, slightly, distressed.

At this distance, years from the original occurrence, as you've tripped over the string of remembrances and context which surrounds the memory, you suddenly see something more clearly.

She had disappeared one summer. With a man. For a month. Abandoning everything of family. One month. Which commenced the day after you'd noticed that ant. The day after your mother had brought you to her house, in the mid afternoon, left you on the porch, and kept you out of the kitchen where they'd spoken, intently, over the linoleum table.

Years on from that day, you remember the ant, and the flowers, and that it had offered more information than your young eyes could have deciphered then. But now... Now it all means so much more. You had been witness when your grandmother had been a person; a woman. -A problem, for your mother. A thing you'd never assumed...

Something similar rattled a friend of mine recently. Her name is Tifny Grace.

I'd like to speak of it..