The Lighthouse
written by: Lenore Weiss
My great aunt with cloudy cataract eyes came to our house and changed rectangles of paper into something else. Snip. Snip. Snip with scissors from our sewing box. She unfolded the paper, held it up to reveal a diamond of cut glass. My great-aunt was the closest thing I had to a grandma, let me remain in her small room on the landing at the top of the stairs in my Aunt Clara’s house where there was a bed and a small porch overlooking the garden where her Singer sewing machine hugged the wall. There was a door to the attic from her room.
They said when she could still see, she made beautiful clothes, a seamstress. Once she traveled by railroad to stay overnight with us and cooked frozen blueberry blintzes, removed the dough down to the filling because she thought it was paper. I told her not to worry because the blueberry was my favorite part. My mother said she went to a place called The Lighthouse to learn Braille, a language of raised dots she could feel with the tip of her finger, but later got records for the blind like those books we listen to in our cars.
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