Family Secrets

Rarely did the family speak of secrets and knowledge weak and indiscreet but as we all know, shared laughter and tears wept draw out our secrets uncontained, never kept. For years, my aunts were mysterious talking of our origins quite serious, deciphering was impossible unless you knew a few words to interpret better as you grew. Little ears often strained to know what grownups held hidden in their domain; listening for the words more easily understood and in that revelation of not what happened but could. Aunt and uncles, cousins too, disliked aunt Jean most intense and distanced themselves from the family name in their defense of the stories never to be told except in quiet retrospect; Aunt Jean, you see, was wild, restless, behaving most incorrect. She danced in bar room halls discarding her clothes for all as drunken men leered upon her naked form she was that way from the very day she was born. She was a free spirit, bipolar, un-diagnosed back then freely taken in and loved by many men the black sheep shunned by our family looked down upon because of her own sense of sanity. Why? The children never really knew except to follow the elders set cue, but as I look back over time sanity may be found wanting in the selfless climb.