PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

When my mother (who was born here to Czechoslovakian immigrants) was a girl, in the neighborhood known as "The Flats" in a town called Dickson City, PA, at the end of the street, there was a dress factory which employed all the women whose fathers, brothers & sons worked the coal mines across the road across the railroad tracks and everybody walked to work and walked back home again. As a child I watched the mountain of coal at night from the upstairs bedroom of my grandma's house, it was that close, right across the road, right across the railroad tracks. I thought people lived in there and that the glow coming off the burning coal was their lamplight. By the time I was old enough to ask to go see it up close, the mine had long been closed and the mountain nothing but a leveled molehill. I do remember visiting the dress factory though and all the gals who envied my mother for marrying a guy from The Big City and getting the hell out of The Flats. Last time I saw it, as a teen, it was nothing but a pile of redbrick rubble.

After all the men died of blacklung (presumably "making Amerika great") as my mother's father did when she was just 15 months old, the women were left to fend for themselves, as my grandmother, who by then had 5 children, did, 2 of which had travelled across the ocean with her to look for the husband whom she hadn't heard from in 3 years that had finally saved enough money to book passage for her and my young uncles. Though my grandmother never learned English (she never had to, all her friends & neighbors spoke the same language) & I never learned Czech, I still heard all the stories from the old country - how cruel her mother-in-law & sister-in-law (whose care her husband left her in after absconding to Amerika with every other fit male in the village) were & how they killed her cow & how she didn't know that shoes come in different sizes until she came here but her feet were already crippled (why that story stuck to me I don't know, maybe it explains my excessive penchant for footwear and why they have to fit just right) & how when she finally found her husband after a year of crossing an ocean & tracking him down (with two little boys in tow), he said he wanted to go back home (to which she promptly replied "F*ck You" in Czech)... when my mother lamented that her mother never told her she loved her, I said "Mom I doubt she knew what Love was, she was just trying to survive." Even though we said "I Love You" to her, she probably thought that it was something people say in America...