.02
chucklan luchmansingh
Born 1926
Mrs. Stephenson’s orchids are dying. All of them. Some of them may already be dead. the long dried tendrils of the once majestic Cateleya reach out of its hanging pot, gesticulating toward the sky like petrified fingers. It was once so beautiful, she says to me over and over, inviting me again to imagine its large lobed blooms, freckled pink and white. A bramble of grey vines in another pot were once tight with shy orange Oncidium flowers. All dead now, she says again. I can’t keep them anymore.
She will turn 95 next Wednesday. the only remaining member of a family of eleven. Five sisters, four brothers, her mother and father. Souvenirs of their funerals sit neatly piled on her dresser. We’ve been talking for five hours, and she’d taken great care reanimating each one of them. the brother who’d worked on the railroad, the same railroad that had killed him in his prime. She remembers well, even though she was just child back then, how he’d made the family laugh in their little house. there was the older sister, ambitious beyond her staton in life - Mrs. Stephenson had admired that about her. there was the brother the lawyer who’d always thought she should’ve been a lawyer herself. You think like a lawyer, he would say to her. She believes now that she should have tried the profession, if she could have it to do all over again, but she was so shy back then, very anxious. She’d become a librarian, and later had opened a bookstore.
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“When the communists came to China... my father had to run...”
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