Always Decisive

At eight years old
she stood in the empty bedroom
of the new house
in Cairo, West Virginia
and said to her six-year-old sister
“This is my room. That one’s yours.”

As her husband drove across the bridge
in Northern Wisconsin she announced,
“I want a house on that lake.”

He didn’t slow the dark blue Packard
with the metal covered spare tires
on the front fenders,
but seven miles up the road
the family stopped for the night
at a white clapboard inn with a green roof.

He never mentioned her remark.
She took notes—
town location,
address of real estate agent,
name of lake,
place to stay the following summer.

It all began like dropping a stone
into the crystal blue of the lake
the ripples gently disturbing
the surface of our lives
now into the fourth generation.

©2010, Janet M. Taliaferro