lifting

Color gets better with age. Someone said that some time last autumn -- I wrote it in the cheater's notebook I carry almost every where I go.

It was with me way back when my father found it easy to talk while driving the gravel roads. We were on the road to Sullivan, a place no longer on the map. He thought if he drove his children there we'd remember the way even though it's gone. But, along the way: there, a red barn in a grove of trees--once an opera house for the orphans growing up in a remote Montana valley.  I am barely amazed, one of us had murmured.

Of course this would be where our great-grandmother grew up. Such verve, such resiliency. Back in the frontier days, when men lost their wives, their children were sent to this orphanage. Wasn't she the one, we asked after heading back to town, who wore purple and orange together when all the other grandmothers were wearing black?

Was she the one, I wonder now, who told us whenever you've got something to say-- say it red. (?) My first lifted quote.