Flat Anna listened intently as grandma recalled  those days of her  enduring the stirrings of discontent while reflecting on  her marriage at a young age to her high school "sweetheart."  Grandma spoke about how the innocence of first love filled with the aspirations of joy and promise could descend to the cold recognition of what was visible and ignored as one blindly jumped into love.  The heady giddiness of young women who responded by marrying the boy  who listened to them in the front seat of the car while pouring out their  hearts out about the  father leaving the house at the slightest bit of tension coming  from the wife and mother who could not be  pleased by him or by  her second daughter.  How many stories like this become the kindling to passion, young  women marrying to escape familial indifference to the illusion to the  imagined promise of love ever after by their skinny greasy haired saviors.     "What does any woman know at the age of eighteen in a small mill town?" grand ma asked out loud.  Remembering those days when the doubts began to surface and the attention to the details of motherhood and keeping house for a man who did not appreciate it could not blot out the anxiety clawed in the pit of grandma's being, as she sat alone at night with the kids asleep.  The tears running down her face unabashedly  thinking about her young foolishness and what a better choice Joetta made.   Joetta rarely made bad choices as her world contained a self-possession that remained solid in the face of criticism and maternal influence.  Joetta married the lawyer whose ambition shown in stark relief to the complacency of the snoring drunk in the younger sister's  bed.  The contrast of her life to Joetta's continued to eat away at grandma. 

Flat Anna wanted to go to Louisville, Kentucky, having become  enchanted with the  stories told to her while sitting with her cheek pressed against  grandma's knee.  " A city can afford a woman  certain opportunities whereas a mill town has its limitations," grandma lamented.  Flat Anna loved the way grand ma talked about life, "I guess it comes from all those years of teaching Theory of Knowledge," thought Anna.     Although Flat Anna traveled extensively, often she  felt that she only apprehended  the surface of things.  Hours upon hours in school libraries could not compete with this admonition of grandma's, "you can be young without money but you cannot be old with it."    Flat Anna came to appreciate that mistakes made in youth can cost one dearly, particularly for a woman on the verge of arrival  to her fortieth decade.   Nothing like  self-reflection in the din of late night snoring in a miserable small bedroom permeated with the smell of alcohol and tobacco rising off the surface of the skin of the man sleeping it it, a woman could begin to feel a restlessness inspired by her  fear of suffocation and a life going nowhere.  Although young and quite precocious, Flat Anna entertained this observation that a woman in her forties garners a kind of intensity, in her recognition that if the mistakes of youth were to be rectified, it would have to happen soon while a vestige of one's attractiveness was still on board. 

FLAT ANNA VISITS LOUISVILLE