Cousin Flora came to pay us a visit.
She was Grandma’s first cousin
and Grandma hadn’t seen her
since they were girls together in Nevada.
She was very different from Grandma.
I did not like her, but there were reasons for my attitude.

She was as huge as Grandma was tiny,
nearly six feet tall and massively built.
She ate mountains of food, masticating slowly but steadily
as she worked her way through what was on her plate–
and she always helped herself to quite a bit.
We kids were outraged when she ate
one-third of a lemon meringue pie herself,
leaving the remaining two-thirds for the six of us.

Her personal offense against me was hardly
her fault—but I held it against her anyway.
I had just been starting my daily piano practice
when Cousin Flora came into the room.
She sat down in the easy chair. At last . . . an
audience! Maybe I had misjudged her after all.
I threw myself into playing as never before.
I attacked my simplified pieces,
“the classics made easy” according to John Thompson.
My fingering was precise in the Scarlatti sonata,
I played Liszt con brio,
while my Chopin ached with emotion.
I finally finished, but my audience had no reaction.
None at all. I finally asked, rather desperately,
“How did you like that, Cousin Flora?”
“Don’t mind me, I’m tone-deaf,” she responded.
I was crushed—all my earnest efforts were for naught.

Although she was a quiet woman,
Cousin Flora was a constant wet blanket.
Most of the time she would sit silently
as we talked of this and that. But we could count
on the fact that, if she chose to contribute,
that contribution would definitely be something negative—
a complaint about how the canned plums tasted or how
I set the table or how she couldn’t sleep in the morning
because of the noise the chickens made.

Worst of all was the fact that she did absolutely nothing.
She basically sat while my grandmother, in addition to her usual
duties and responsibilities, “fetched and carried” for Cousin Flora.
At the end of a month, Grandma was tired and worn out.
My parents were worried; they conversed in low tones, trying
to figure out how to bring Flora’s visit to a close without being rude.
They needn’t have bothered; Cousin Flora saved them
the trouble. She announced one morning that
she had been at our house long enough. Not that much
was going on and she was getting bored. She would be taking
the bus to Aunt Bertha’s tomorrow. So, Cousin Flora departed,
dour to the last but speeded onward by our happiness at her departure.

She gave Grandma a present when she left.
She had started piecing the pattern for a Dresden Plate quilt,
but it was going to be a lot of work to finish.
“Maybe you’d like the pieces, Lillie,” she said.
“You like quilting better than I do.”

Grandma decided that the quilt would be my
high school graduation present. She didn’t know if she
would live to see that day, so she’d better get started right now.
She asked me what color I wanted for the background
and I picked a golden yellow.

Cousin Flora’s visit had only been a month long,
but it seemed like she had been in our house,
in our lives, and in our resentful thoughts
for a lifetime.