Tag Archives: Family

Missive From the Snow Globe by Charlotte Matthews

Photo of snow globe
 

Not sure how we got here. But here is where we are. My next-door neighbor, Sarah, and her little sister Pearl, and me. We were eating cereal at their red kitchen table, the light of January moving across the wall where their parakeets, Peet and Repeat, lunge sporadically around their cage. We were at the kitchen table one moment. And the next we were inside this snow globe. On the floor is a circular rug, red and pink with miniature roses, probably wool, like the rugs at the store where Mom works. To the left … Continue reading Missive From the Snow Globe by Charlotte Matthews

The Hibiscus by Amy Boyes

Close up of bright red hibiscus flower
 

Amy Boyes has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest   The hibiscuses arrived in six-inch grower pots. Packed for cold weather in a foil and Styrofoam-lined box, they had journeyed in a transport trailer to my grandmother’s prairie flower shop. “Careful, those are live plants!” Grandma would warn, as if “LIVE PLANTS” emblazed on the cardboard box was an insufficient indication. Deposited on the shop floor, the box remained until a knife or pair of scissors could be fetched. Typically, neither was found and a substitute tool was employed—pruning clippers or even … Continue reading The Hibiscus by Amy Boyes

The Bridge of Sighs by Martha Wiseman

Martha Wiseman has earned an Honorable Mention in Streetlight’s 2023 Essay/Memoir Contest

 

My mother sighed. Frequently, variously, operatically. She was, after all, a singer, a dramatic soprano.I can barely sing. But I can sigh. All my life I’ve apparently been practicing my mother’s repertoire of sighs. A teacher once told me I sighed more than anyone she’d ever met. She never met my mother.

***

My mother sighed when faced with something she’d prefer not to do (and she preferred not to do a great many things). She sighed when I became, as she might say, obstreperous. She sighed when thinking of her own history. Some of the arias she practiced sounded like sighs to me.

Close up photo of frowning Lego woman with viking hat, long braided hair, and sword
Lego Opera Singer-not happy by Ted Drake. CC license.

Let me catalogue her repertoire. Some sighs began with deep, long inhalations, as if she were sucking in air, the exhalations like descending arpeggios, a soul sinking down. Some entailed a rapid series of brief inhales followed by an extended sequence of outpuffs. Some involved a slow intake of air leading up to a heart-rending moan of Oh, God. Late in the evening, as she settled herself in bed—perhaps with her copy of The Food of Italy—the sighs ranged from melodic to labored and stuttered, an unmistakable song cycle, a summary of another melancholy day, her version, I like to think, of vespers.

***

My mother adored things Italian. She’d lived in Italy, studying opera, the year before I was born. I don’t think she lived in Venice. But perhaps she visited that watery city and crossed the Bridge of Sighs. My mother’s name was Nell, but she preferred to be addressed as Nella.

***

I’ve read that these days, one can enter the Bridge of Sighs only as part of a tour, and only in summer. As the bridge is enclosed and its windows barred, visitors may become overheated and claustrophobic. One would, I suppose, if one were headed to the prison on one side of the bridge.

Ah! Sospiro!

***

My mother may at one time have been in love with a tall Italian man named Gernando. She referred to him as a friend. At some point, I realized I hadn’t heard her mention him in a long time. I asked about him. Her face clouded and she sighed almost angrily and said she never wanted to hear his name again. I could glean only that they’d planned to celebrate New Year’s Eve together and he did not show up and soon married—married someone else, I supposed she meant. My mother never forgave him.

***

I’ve never been to Italy. But if I ever go to Venice, perhaps I’ll walk on the Bridge of Sighs and heave a good sigh for my mother.

***

My mother, despite her Italian leanings, did not like Puccini. I find that I don’t much, either. She loved Mozart, as do I, and he was Austrian. The libretti for most of his operas, however, were in Italian. She found Beethoven too Germanic. But she sang Hugo Wolf, and she was partial to Richard Strauss.

After my mother died, I found a picture postcard of Venice’s iconic opera house, La Fenice, among the few mementos she’d kept.

***

I don’t think my mother knew that Byron’s “Childe Harold” (he just goes on and on, she might have said) is credited with making the bridge famous:

I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,
A palace and a prison on each hand:
I saw from out the wave her structures rise
As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand . . .

The legends attached to the Bridge of Sighs—that convicts crossing over from interrogation in the Doge’s Palace to their place of confinement sighed their last sigh of freedom on this bridge or sighed at their last view of the city; that lovers passing beneath the bridge were guaranteed a never-ending amore, their sighs of contentment breathed upward—are just that, legends, the one historically impossible, the other wishful.

Maybe my mother slid under the Bridge of Sighs in a gondola. Was she with anyone besides the gondolier? Her own wishful thinking—her longing for lasting love, for an operatic life—would have led her to sigh dramatically, trailing her hand through the polluted water.

When she lived in Italy, she was married to my father, but he was not with her. She said she came home because she wanted to have me before she was too old. That wish was fulfilled, at least. The lasting love vanished.

Photo of the bridge of sighs from the water
The Bridge of Sighs by helicon two (flickr.com). CC license.

***

I sigh. The sighs are my mother’s legacy. A bridge between us. Perhaps that is overly symbolic, but the metaphor seems fitting. Straightforward, which our relationship wasn’t.

Sometimes simplicity and straightforwardness are reassuring.

***

I hear myself taking a deep, almost gulping breath. I hear the rough, sorrowful exhalation that follows.

I hear my mother.


Martha G. Wiseman
Martha Graham Wiseman has been an acting student, a dancer, and an editor. She taught English at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., until retiring in 2020. Her essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Fish Anthology 2021, Ponder Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, Under the Sun, The Santa Ana River Review, The Bookends Review, oranges journal (U.K.), Kestrel, and Map Literary; work is forthcoming from Queen’s Quarterly (Canada). She has also published fiction and poetry.

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Southbound by Sharon Ackerman

Old bible and watch
 

My dad’s family bible and watch finally arrived in the mail to me nearly twenty years after his death. How it happened is a circuitous story, worthy of a southern novel. Of note, I did in the getting, offer to pay my nephew a sum of money to steal the bible off my sister’s coffee table. It didn’t come to that but hopefully gave my nephew and niece a tale to tell. Novelist Pat Conroy once contended there are no crimes in families beyond forgiveness. Well, that rings true. The presence of these items in … Continue reading Southbound by Sharon Ackerman

Writing History’s Happenstance by Fred Wilbur

Photo of brochures and postcards
 

During my older sister’s annual visit last fall, three shoe boxes came into the house with her luggage. After the usual greetings and settling in, she opened the Florsheim boxes to reveal a postcard collection. In an effort to clean out her Tennessee Victorian, a closet shelf having collapsed the week before, she decided she didn’t want them anymore: would I be interested in them? History is always a bit surprising, especially when close to one’s personal narrative. Imagine the archaeologist who digs up an artifact that totally alters the theory he has been working … Continue reading Writing History’s Happenstance by Fred Wilbur

Watching Colors Fade By Kathleen Coleman Thomas

Author Kathleen Coleman Thomas and her mother Patty Coleman
 

Turning sixty last month mandated a driver’s license renewal that replaced my wide-eyed forty-year-old self with a puffy-eyed, wrinkly-necked person unmistakably related to the round-faced woman who gave me life. I stare at my new picture and wince, wondering if the blood flow to my brain will one day be limited. But I also look with pride, remembering the vibrant, funny, empathetic person my mother once was, hopeful I inherited some of her better traits, too. That ninety-year-old now lives with me and asks repeatedly, sometimes three or more times in a five-minute span, “What’s … Continue reading Watching Colors Fade By Kathleen Coleman Thomas

Red Sofa by Trudy Hale

Photo of red sofa
 

When I was thirteen, my mother left us. It was on a Sunday and she knew that Daddy, my brothers and I were away, visiting a family out on the old Nashville road. A moving van pulled up to the duplex and my mother emptied the rooms. Excited by the drama, neighbors watched from their front yards. My mother ‘stole’ the large Heriz oriental rug, the twisty verdigris wrought iron table, the African basket lamps in moss green linen shades—my friends had never seen such lamps. The hand-embroidered pillows, magenta and orange molas sewn by … Continue reading Red Sofa by Trudy Hale

Angry by Alan Brickman

Photo of two old hands holding each other
 

  Marie moved her mother Florence into an elder care facility only two months ago, but still got lost trying to find it. It was an incongruously red brick institutional building dropped into a suburban neighborhood of single family split levels and ranch houses, all on tree-named streets like Birch or Willow that formed no recognizable grid or pattern but were rather a random and meandering tangle that was impossible to navigate. She left her house late, and was now even later for being lost, which would add yet another level of tension to this … Continue reading Angry by Alan Brickman

Whiskey Island Mango Salad by Janine De Baise

Photo of salad with fruit
 

Whenever I say that my extended family camps together in the summer—living in tents, cooking over the fire, and bathing in the river—someone will ask, “And you all get along? For a whole week?” Sure, I say. Of course, I’m lying. My family includes my seventy-something father who loses his temper if he doesn’t get an afternoon nap, my sister Carroll who just stops talking at the first sign of trouble, my sister Laurie who has been known to threaten family members with a sharp knife while making fruit salad, my brother Kevin who refused … Continue reading Whiskey Island Mango Salad by Janine De Baise

Betelguese by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett

Photo of twisted building in fog
 

  What the sky chart would indicate is that he and his dog, Bella, are looking at is the constellation Orion. But what he sees is the Frozen Butterfly, one of the constellations his sister taught him. Jack had contemplated bringing his daughter out to stargaze with him, maybe do a little storytelling to his grown and unsettled girl. But she was reluctant in the cold, so it’s just him and Bella—named for Bellatrix, the constellation’s third brightest star. He’s looking at it now, picking it out in the Butterfly’s wing. The first time he … Continue reading Betelguese by Stephanie Coyne DeGhett