The House of Broken Dreams

Granddaddy Cowan always told Mama she had her wagon hitched to a star. She had her goals, and she could have soared. She did accomplish amazing things, but Mama’s problem in realizing her most important dreams came not in her vision but in her choices. She always willingly chose paths that kept her earthbound. As Laurel rubbed the cold granite of the headstone that joined Mama and Daddy in death in an intimacy and peace they’d never found in life, she acknowledged that she hadn’t always understood that about Mama. So, stuck in the mundane with all Mama’s dreams languishing around her, she had felt duty bound to play the surrogate and jump into that wagon and fly them all to the stars. She was the observer, after all. Hadn’t she known what her family needed to be happy? She had to learn the hard way that the most vital part of her mother’s failure lay in lack of commitment, that she didn’t want to go anywhere and neither did the rest of her family. They might have been unhappy in the life they’d chosen, but they were firmly rooted in its familiarity while her soul had yearned to reach those heights Mama had pointed her toward. For so many years her life had been an ongoing balance of helping her out-of-control family to survive and of trying to realize her own dreams. Many times she had feared that she would be grounded in the mire of their bad choices, but she had never wanted to choose between her dreams and theirs. Eleven years ago she had been forced to make that choice. She crossed the path that separated the large expanse of the Harper plot and crouched to deliver her last rose. Tears blurred the inscription on the headstone, “Gene Sinclair Harper”, and her gloved fingers snagged on the etching in the cold granite as she traced them over the indentation of each letter. “Everyone thought you were fearless,” she whispered stroking her brother’s name, “but you didn’t think you deserved to live, so you just didn’t care. You never stood a chance, did you? She made you believe you were born against God’s will. It wasn’t true. You were a gift. You were supposed to be loved and cherished.” Warm tears trickled down her cold cheeks “I loved you, and I wanted to save you. I tried, but instead, it was you who saved me. You gave me the courage to walk away. Rest in peace.”