THE BEAUTY

Small, shrunken by age, and her paper-skin face that every night was crumpled into a ball and thrown away and every morning rescued from the bin and carefully she smoothed it out as best as she was able, forlornly patting powder on the wrinkles and with the greatest care painting on the eyes and lips where she guessed they ought to be.
Her hair quite white.
Granny Woods.
Not our granny, but "Granny" nonetheless, and old as mastadons.
She gave us orange squash, a bit too watered down
in cut-glass tumblers more antique than she,
and biscuits on a bone china plate decorously decorated
with delicate roses,
and someone said "who is that?"
We and she followed the pointing finger to a portrait on the wall,
to see a young woman in all her bounteous beauty,
her auburn hair a harvest home of riches
reaped when at the peak of their perfection.
Ringlets framed a lovely face and fell upon
a bosom where a plunging decolletage
revealed the beginnings of a hidden valley
between two perfect breasts.
Her expression was confident as a conqueror
surveying a defeated army,
and in her hand a riding crop.
"Oh yes. I was a beauty" said Granny Woods.
"Young men, handsome and of faultless pedigree
came a-courting me.
I could have had any one
of more than a score."
Her eyes drifted towards a distant time, still vivid in her mind,
but invisible to us.
There were, we thought, two lives,
and two distinctly different people,
but had we tracked back through her life,
we would have seen, in reverse,
a gradual transformation;
a merging of the two:
we would have seen that many,
many lives
spring from a single source.