Lacuna

A peaceful day on the Atlantic coast. Peach jam, buttermilk biscuits, and broccoli-cheese omelette's and coffee for breakfast with my Nana, Aunt Deborah, and Laura. The August early morning heat makes the blood in your veins feel heavy as molasses. You could cut the air like a knife whistling through rose petaled avenues on a beach cruiser to the shore on a day like today, before laying down a towel to read a book on the sands.

To read a delicious book on the beach all day, this is the life. Barbara Kingsolver spins an intriguing yarn, she told me, "the most interesting part of the story is the part not told". The lacuna, the dip, the missing piece in every life. Mmmm, I want to hold on to that and think about it, savor it like a candy in my mouth...

My Nana has so many stories, so much life history it astounds me. Each time I see her visions from the past will well up to the surface unbidden. This time she told me about growing up in rural coastal Delaware around the turn of the last century. Hard times and hard men on horseback, the railroad, strikers and unions. She says I look like her father, my great grandfather. She told me about how she met my grandfather too. I never knew that he almost died from tuberculosis and was sent out West for the 'rarifying air'. After everything else failed by the grace of some miracle he survived. He attributed it to the Christian Science Church, the last thing they tried, praying fervently, for months on his death bed, postponed until the day he died at a ripe old age many many years later when I was a little boy. My Nana is still a devout Christian Scientist too.

She tells me all of these things and I just listen, filling in the lacunas in her stream of conscious, still bright and sharp after over 96 years.