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Title
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Groundhog Day

Margaret Wilmot

The Fictile Word

First publication: September 2007

http://badosa.com/n287

The photo shows them young beyond imagining though my grandparents must already have been in their thirties. Maybe Grandpa was even then beginning to suggest they look for a larger house than the one he had built on a vacant lot opposite the Franklin School before he was married. It’s hard to imagine Grandma digging in her heels, except gardening, but she refused to move. Not only did she love the house her man from Kentucky had built: it was a fulfilment of destiny. When she was sixteen years old in Medford, Massachussetts, she’d seen a play about a man in Kentucky who built a house opposite a school and married his sweetheart and lived happily ever after. Years later in California—so they did.

But what happened to the daughter who never had a room of her own? What choices did she make? What happened to her daughter? And the son in a house of limited space, who never had a room of his own?

Is this Groundhog Day? Or a boring updated version of the Oresteia? Because in this saga of ongoing generations we may also inquire about family relations, even unto the son’s sons, in houses which shrank as they multiplied.

One became a photographer.