Grandmother had told me tales of the past,
Fairytales that we’ve all heard of,
The maidens in the scullery maid attire,
transforming to the princesses with the
embroidered and jeweled gowns; rivulets of silks and satins,
blue as the sea, greener than the highlands, more purple
then the dusky skylines, a true stamp
of royalty, poise, eloquence, and beauty.
And ensembles topped off with gold
encrusted and amethyst crowns.
Sure, the fairytales were what I lingered
onto during the years of my inexplicitly
innocent childhood, that I wished I still had.
I missed it, the tales, the anecdotes
that shaped my perception on love, hope, and faith,
far off from what I viewed in the looking mirror today.
I missed my grandmother’s hands, brittle and worn,
but kind and warm; I still thought about them
as I cleaned out the attic in which I’d forgotten existed.
And I grew up, my memories of it faded,
now covered in cobwebs and bristling wind
that sent a chill up my spine, but I found
much more than what my memory had allowed me to collect.
Amulets from what I assumed to be my grandmother’s youth
were stowed and tucked away in the alcove of a velvet shelf,
hidden by the splintered of decaying wood.
Next to the swell of the dresser, the door of the
furnishing remained ajar, revealing manila
colored increments of letters, some harbored
by the envelopes, some pierced out in the open.
The edges had crippled away,
flecks falling to the sandalwood bottom.
They were timeless, old, maybe not important,
to the wandering eyes of a stranger.
But to me - they held a mystery
that was waiting to be unraveled.
A story of my grandmother’s life she never shared with me,
just as private as she was open, perhaps I’d find in those envelopes
the same mindset I also had when I was young.
Perhaps she believed and dreamt of fairytales I had once done,
paraded around in the jewels and bangles hidden way,
basked in the ambiance of a sweet love
that was doomed to end in the decay of both parties.
Little figurines of silver and gold were placed under one
of the drawers parked away in the furnishing,
toys form her childhood, weighted by standard and price.
Her words I had adored as a child,
ate them up like sickly syrup and supported
them as if they were undiscovered treasure, but
now I finally got to “see” my grandmother’s
treasures deposited in her attic, the very place she
had hidden the most interesting stories that she
left for me to discover after she left.