I remember a cool spring day when I was a child. I was at the clothes line with Grannie and holding the pinbucket for her to hang sheets.
We had lost my uncle the year prior and my aunt had just been diagnosed as terminal. Watching the tears roll down her face as she fought the sheets to get them up and over the line she turns and says "I want you to run away from here when I pass on, and I don't want you to marry a woman or have children either."
My natural curiosity prompted me to ask why.
Her reply was "I want you to have a life of your own."
She knew. She knew so many things at the moment of grief.
I listened, and did what she said. Her children have never forgiven me for not staying to saddle the abuses they had in store for me in her absence.
She was a Roosevelt Democrat along with her brother and husband. All of her children with the exception of the oldest are and were hard right conservative Republicans.
She fucking knew.
