I know what my ancestors REALLY were...

[Lily of the Night]

I grew up with my grandmother. I lived with my parents, but I grew up with my grandmother. Grann lived in a little extension on the back of our one-story neighborhood house. Well, they called it a neighborhood, but it was like none other I'd ever known. Each house had a long backyard leading down to a quasi-lake, but were crammed together from the side as if the builders made up for the lack of vertical space by shoving more single-stories into the area.

But if the claustrophobia was unbearable the little lake made up for it. The area looked as if Paul Bunyan had come to the spot as a little boy and started to make a mote in his sandbox, but was called home before he could finish resulting in a bean-shaped puddle. The houses surrounded the lake as if their very inanimate lives depended on its waters like the willow on the bank did. Beyond the close crop of houses laid all of the normal neighborhoods with little lanes and cul-de-sacs.

[Lily of the Night]

It was enough for me. All I ever wanted was that little extension with the half-lake and my grandmothers lap. Grann had been telling me tales forever, since I was born even. Always in her lap or on her knee, sitting in her little extension house. And always the same kind of tales, the ones about our ancestors. She told me the truth, that this area had once been all wooded. She told me that the willow, along with the scattered few trees that were left, had all been part of a vast forest in which the only break was our little lake. I absorbed it all like a dry sponge thrown into a bathtub.

It wasn't until I was around three or four that I made the connection that they were stories, like the ones my mother would tell me before bed. I remember as Grann finished a story I looked up at her wrinkled face so alive with her story and told her, "Thank you, Grann. That was a great story." There was no greater moment of regret than the one that followed. Grann gave a small yelp, as if burned by the thought, and she leaped off her stool, sending me to the carpet. "Story?" she cried, "Story!" I couldn't quite tell if she was yelling at me or at the very air she breathed. "I spend my life telling you your sacred history... and you call it a mere story?" Finally she turned and directed her attention on me. "Is that what you've thought all this time? That I've been telling you stories?" Her pale face was rosy at the very thought of it. "No, no," I reassured her. "But Mom said--" She cut me off with a wave of the hand and a sharp Bah. "That mother of yours. She never grasped the gravity of it. But you know, you understand what I teach you." I nodded, to surprised to speak.