Carolyn Kenny

Pictured is the candy dish of a woman born one-hundred-twenty-years ago, Vera. Her father was a boiler- maker for the railroad; her housewife mother was often ailing after Vera’s eighth sibling, my father, was born, and so Vera became a kind of mother to my father in that wild house.

A family story I can’t now confirm: that Vera returned home without her much older husband on the second night of their honeymoon. She kept only his name.

Years later, while my father was away in World War II and I was about 3, my mother took me a few times on the long bus ride to visit Vera in Kearny, New Jersey.  I remember being in the living room in front of a fireplace and Vera’s bulldog biting me.  I remember asking my mother if she and I could hug each other while rolling down Vera’s sloping lawn without our clothes on. My mother said no. Vera laughed. I was told she laughed easily. I was told she often gave my mother her meat coupons.

Vera died soon after the War. Fifty years later when I bought a house in New Mexico on a road called Kearny, another niece of Vera’s, Claire, a teenager when Vera was alive, gave me Vera’s candy dish as a house-warming gift.  It has warmed me and my house these past years on my living room table under the skylight, representing a sunny woman who sustained others.