Like a lion wrangler, she pulls me
into a room furnished entirely, she claims,
with furniture made by Brigham Young.
And though my face is the picture
of skepticism, I’m wearing a mask,
so she rewards my muffled “wow”
with a satisfied smile. From there,
we charge across the hall to see shoes
so narrow they look like doll slippers,
and she tells me how her grandma
could not walk more than a mile
because of her tiny feet, and can you believe
how small the pioneers were compared
to us today, but boy could they make
things last. I nod and follow her
to another display: a century-old
wedding cake beside a case of silkworm
cocoons. Whispering, she tells
how pioneer women incubated them
in the warmth between their breasts
until the silk sacs stirred and the worms
wiggled free, and I nod again and murmur
my “wow” because I have no idea
if what she’s saying is true.
So we go, room by room.
Here’s a drum someone’s uncle played
in the funeral procession of the Martyrs.
And that heavy flatiron there, the one
with the worn wooden handle?
It’s honest-to-goodness proof
that pioneer women were just as strong
as pioneer men. Pick it up. You’ll see.
She tells me about every knickknack
and broken piece of bric-a-brac
between me and the door. But the thing
she points out, again and again,
is the size of the clothes. Imagine,
she says, how odd it must have been
to be so small in such a rough and tumble world,
where shoes were neither left nor right—
and here, let me show you some handmade lace.
Scott Hales is a writer living in Eagle Mountain, Utah. He is the author of The Garden of Enid: Adventures of a Weird Mormon Girl and Hemingway in Paradise and Other Mormon Poems. His writing has appeared in Irreantum, BYU Studies, and a few other places.
