Named

by Sally Evans

I’ve always known there was an Auntie Sally.
I think of her as long-skirted and tall.
Welsh she’d speak, she’d have a hat and shawl.
She looked after my grandma and her sisters,
not their mother, but family on call.

She thought my parents named me after her.
Perhaps she saw me, but I was too small.
They hadn’t named me thus. Their benefit
was heirloom furniture on her decease,
book shelves and écritoires to grace our hall.

Perhaps she thought of me in what was left
of her long age in some village in Wales,
she gone before I spoke, and long before
I had perspective to make sense of tales.
So she remained, vague. ancient, lost, unknown.

No one has mentioned her through these long years.
But now I’m like her, I discover her,
imagining perhaps her end of days,
with no one to receive a case of books
(and to be fair, I used then lost her chairs).

She was my benefactress, unforeseen,
enabling a direct if distant view,
two Sallys far apart, who barely knew
this sliver of connection. But it’s there,
I lived not knowing, but becoming her.