Summers at the Blue Lake

My grandmothers were lesbians, a truth they neither exposed nor concealed. Every Sunday they took their place in the third pew, left of the aisle, at Lakeside Lutheran....Monday would come, and with it, a spiritual hangover. Once again, my grandmothers were acknowledged with a whisper, a nudge in the hardware store, a smile that lasted a second too long. There were other things, too-unspeakable other things that caused my mother to turn away from me when I asked her about her childhood.... The word was not forbidden in our house. I had heard it often and had practiced saying the beautiful syllables in my mirror. "Lez-be-an." It sounded exotic like sapphire or emerald ....For my fourth-grade family heritage report, I boasted that I was Scotch-Irish on my father's side, and on my mother's side we were Lesbian. I did not understand when Mrs. Faust sent me to the nurse's office to wait for my mother after school.... My mother nodded to Nurse Witmer, and together they fumbled over blunt phrases they had hoped wouldn't be necessary....Visits to my grandmothers became charged with my new knowledge, as if I had just been given the secret ingredient in the family recipe for barbecue sauce. I never had to entertain the baggage of my mother's childhood; I could see my grandmothers with the wonder they were due. When I was with them, I felt cemented into my heritage in a way that surpassed the fourth-grade curriculum.Althouse-Wood, Jill is the author of 'Summers at the Blue Lake ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781565124967 and ISBN 1565124960.