My mother found a lump in my grandmother’s breast, and a
dimple. I always think of Shirley Temple
when I hear the word dimple. Cliché, nonetheless it is there amid images of white picket fences and ringlets
and crisp yellow daffodils. I imagine that
my grandmother’s dimple dances as she moves.
My grandmother helped teach me to read. I rested against her
breasts as she coaxed my voice to sound out the words of Dick and Jane calling “Run
Spot, run.” We always sat in the same
chair, in her cool green living room, in the big farmhouse that I knew as well
as my toes and the way they dipped in the ditch water to live, for a moment,
with snails and leeches.
I regarded my breasts the other day, committed them to
memory, noted the pendulous, dimplelessness of their sway, and cried.
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