.     Image excerpted from To Build a Fire installation by Cherry Smiley

Kindling

I'm awake early this morning to think. I used to love waking up early in the winter with my grandma. We'd sit together, just her and I, and I'd watch her make a fire. This was a good time to be together. My grandma told a lot of stories and was I ever lucky to get to hear them. When I close my eyes, I can hear her chuckling away at her own jokes with a half-smile and watch her hands move the story along. As we both got older, grandma would tell me other stories about her life and the lives of other women. All of a sudden - to me, not her - a sentence or two about sexual assault or rape or any number of brutalities dropped into the air between us and would disappear just as quickly as other stories about other things filled the space. I've thought alot about why my grandma chose to tell me these stories in this way and I won't ever know why. What I learned from this though, is that it's better to say it, even if it's just for a second or two and even if that's as far as the story goes because that's actually a long way for stories like this to travel. Carrying these stories around is heavy and finding words to make sense of what happened is a journey that some women don't survive. Sending these stories along outsides of yourself is just as difficult, sometimes more so. There are probably stories that left when grandma did without ever reaching the surface and that's ok, it's like that sometimes.

by Cherry Smiley

Text excerpted from