What I Would Never Know ( My 200 Words)

Ma’s voice over the phone sounds anxious, “Mamon…how are you?”

Long pauses between words. “Ma, is everything alright?”

She blurts out, “Mamon, Dimma is no more.”

As she breaks down over the phone, crying for her mother who was only eighteen years older than her, I begin to think of the stories I will never get to know.

“Mamon, Dimma has left two journals…only for you…you were her only grand-daughter after all.”

My Dimma had twelve grandkids. Me and my eleven male cousins.

I try to remember a much younger Dimma. Eighteen years ago, when she was my mother’s age. Hands on her hips, she had instructed me, on my twelfth birthday, “You have grown up a lot, shonai. You better learn to lie your aaaaaassss off. Very verry quick.”

As I move through my apartment, trying to figure out what the heck I am going to say to my students about A Room of One’s Own, I want to think of my Dimma’s diaries. I have never seen her read. I have never seen her write. Other than grocery lists. How does it feel to touch the pen with fingers devoted to a lifetime of cooking and pickling? I wouldn’t know.