Three Irish Sisters: May, Anna and Grace - 1891, 1893 and 1895 - my grandfather's sisters. These Great Aunts were the oldest people I've ever known. May was born during the Benjamin Harrison administration. Memories of them are mostly vague & grey with little contrast, but they can suddenly explode in glowing color and stand out like newly leaved trees in spring - only for an instant, then gone. When we were little, my brother and cousins and I feared all of them - their oldness, their strictness, their clothes, their furniture, their pointy glasses like devil horns. May lived one floor above my grandparents, and when sent up those green stairs to knock upon her rickety old white door, we felt like the condemned climbing the gallows. And the back stairs were too scary to even contemplate. Dark and wooden, twisting and creaky - just a glance into that abysmal stairwell would send us retreating at breakneck pace through the back door out to the lawn and sunshine and safety. Inside her apartment one expected to see Bela Lugosi lurking in the shadows. It was all so old - the thickly draped windows that diffusely lit the rooms - the heavy marble tabletops covered with lace - the strangely shaped sofas and chairs that were uncomfortable to bounce upon. And May, eagle-eyed, always keeping sharp watch over our manners, quickly squelching any such attempts to bounce. Even the candy in the lead crystal swan seemed fossilized and from 1910, its flavor faded and strange, sending one to the only other refreshment - the weak tea May made with the recycled teabags which she hung out on the clothesline. The centerpiece in this museum de l'horreur was an enormous black piano upon which dust and tall stacks of yellowed sheet music rested. Somehow my brother and I managed to avoid having to take the wholey dreaded piano lessons as every other youth in the family had since the 1920s.(Family gatherings abound with simular tales of anxiety, scoldings and knuckles being rapped with rulers.) Grace and Anna, though younger than May, were even scarier(Anna's hair was blue-grey), but they were also more distant and seldom seen, thus less remembered.

The three irish sisters and their younger brother all died within a short period spanning from 1978 to 1981. May, the oldest, who in the 1890s had taken care of them all, lived the longest. I never knew any of them beyond the narrow perspective of a young boy. D r e a m s and I now strain in effort to remember them as they really were. As a young man, in the old family cellar, I had discovered some photographs of the 3 sisters taken while they were young women - standing together out in the garden at the same old house - 3 flappers with dark eyes and cigarettes - bobbed hair and hats - short skirts and rolled stockings - bold expressions and smiles - photographs they probably kept hidden away from the sight of their strict elders.