Dear Sister

I will burn the box of books you sent me.

I will not open the box.  I will burn the books.

I did not ask you to send them.  I thought

you and Pep had gotten rid of them years

before but no.  You were mortified, you said,

when you saw Pep moving them out of the tack

room where they had been stored for 16 years. 

Our mother was the last person I ever heard

use the word mortified.  I am sorry.  I am sorry

that I couldn’t fly halfway around the world

to Laramie, to truck the several boxes to a landfill,

or piecemeal  throw them into dumpsters

at U. Dub  probably when Cowboy Joe was throwing

a sold-out pre-game banquet  . . . but I can’t. 

Forgive me.

I will burn them.  I know you did not send them

out of the goodness of your heart but only to remind

me of what an encumbrance my unsold and unread

books have been on your life.

On some calm night when the Thai family I live

with is away at a wedding or funeral party and I am

the only one here, I will take the box out to

the irrigation canal and burn them where we burn

household trash.

Writing the book kept me alive through disparate

times in one foreign country and it only seems

fitting that they are burned here in another

foreign country.  I will toast the flames that

rise knowing full well that they are not consuming

the past or any seventy-year-old bonds between you

and me.  Writing is a lonely art, and I will toast

the flames and the updraft of heat and char

alone for knowing that.

FG           8/8/2015

Not once in 16 years did Pep ever write and say that the boxes of my books were in the way or he needed them gone.  If he had I would have paid him to bury or burn them.  There may be a story behind the story of my sister's discomfort, but if there is, I don't know what it is.