The girls, Harriet and Carla, pulled into the tree shrouded driveway and immediately sensed a grim stillness. They got down from the pickup which now seemed too high. They approached the house via an ever lengthening walkway to the front door.
The screen door squeaked open on it’s hinges. The sisters looked up to see their father placing two suitcases in the front hallway. “Your mother and I are going to Tennessee for a few days. If you’re coming you should probably get packed”
“Grandma?” was all Harriet could say.
Their father nodded and Carla took off to her room to start packing. Harriet was about to follow her twins example when the sound of heavy sobbing came out of her parents room. She pushed the door open and saw her Mom sitting on the bed crying into a wad of tissues. A cell phone was on the bed beside her. Harriet rushed in and wrapped her arms around her mothers shoulders.
“She didn’t even wait for me to say goodbye. Why? First she’s in the Hospital and now she’s gone. Why couldn’t she wait for me to get there?”
“Oh mom. It probably wasn’t her choice.”
Dad was standing in the door way listening, “I’ll go tell Carla that there’s no hurry now.,” he said and walked away.
“I just wish so much knowledge hadn’t died with her.” Mom said wiping her eyes again. “She was trying to find the truth in some of my Grandma’s old stories. At one time she had this great big book of Family History and your grandma had it traced almost back to the Revolutionary War.”
“What happened to it?”
It wasn’t Harriet who asked this.
Looking up from her tear soaked tissue pulp mom saw Carla standing in the doorway, her father’s arm resting on her shoulders. “I can’t really say. Mom must have found something bad in her research. Because she came home and burned it all. She said, ‘Alison remember, some things were meant to be forgotten.’ And then she threw what looked like an old diary into the flames after her family research book.”
“Wow.” Was all either of the girls could think of to say.
“I wish I could remember my Grandmas stories. I should have written them down.” Carla came in and joined her mother and sister on the bed. The closeness of her children started another round of tears in Alison daughter of Carolina Gellervice. “If I had only taken more of an interest in her research. Maybe I could have stopped her from burning our Family history.”
Dad finally entered the room. “Not if she was right.” He stood his wife up and held her in his embrace. “Maybe some things should be forgotten.”
© This story and subsequent parts are my own original idea and are protected under United States copy right law.
C. O. Bonham 