Friday Family - The Carlsons

On Facebook, a cousin of mine recently posted this picture (c. 1930) of my grandparents, Helen and Walter Carlson. They look kind of sad, don't they? My mother was their second of four daughters.

I knew them well as a child because we lived only about five or six blocks away from them in Norfolk, NE. I spent a lot of time at their house.

Just after my college years, around the time I got married, my grandmother got angry at my parents for something and held an awful grudge against them. From that time on, Helen and Walter wouldn't have a thing to do with us. I was twenty-three years old, I never saw or spoke to either of them again.

A Room in the Past
It’s a kitchen. Its curtains fill
with a morning light so bright
you can’t see beyond its windows
into the afternoon. A kitchen
falling through time with its things
in their places, the dishes jingling
up in the cupboard, the bucket
of drinking water rippled as if
a truck had just gone past, but that truck
was thirty years. No one’s at home
in this room. Its counter is wiped,
and the dishrag hangs from its nail,
a dry leaf. In housedresses of mist,
blue aprons of rain, my grandmother
moved through this life like a ghost,
and when she had finished her years,
she put them all back in their places
and wiped out the sink, turning her back
on the rest of us, forever.

Ted Kooser, “A Room in the Past” from One World at a Time.
Copyright © 1985 by Ted Kooser.