Flower Song
"I am an old woman now. The buffalos and chickens are gone, and our Grecian ways are almost gone. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that I ever lived them. All my children six girls were born in Greece.
Where we went to the bathroom outside.
I was orphaned at a young age. My father passed in the war. And my mother was smart. I was married young to a good looking although charismatic and coiled man.
My little daughters grew up in the Greek-
American white man's school and church.
They are all doing well. They all proud of the education their father and I have given them. They are married with kids of their own. I live with my one daughter. She can read books, and she owns business. She is a leader among our Greek people, helping teach them to follow the white man's road. She is kind to me. We no longer live in an earth lodge, but in a house with chimneys, and my daughter cooks by a stove.
But for me, I cannot forget our old ways.
Often in summer I rise at daybreak and steal out to the fields, and as I hoe the ground I sing to it, as we did when I was young. No one cares for our flower songs now.
Sometimes in the evening I sit, looking out on the big Hellas. The sun sets, and dusk steals over the water. In the shadows I see again to see our Greek village, with smoke curling upward from the earth lodges, and in the river's roar I hear the yells of the warriors, and the laughter of little children of old.
It is but an old woman's dream. Then I see but shadows and hear only the roar of the river, and tears come into my eyes. Our Greek life, I know, is gone forever." She said.
"And when thoughts of suicide entered my mind, I thought of my favorite grandchild.
I imagined him calling my name and yelling to not do such a thing, I didn't. The curse of the coiled man touched me and my family in a variety of ways. But they never do discuss the trials of the troubled woman."
Eleni Kakarikos Klementzou
She passed away few short years later of cancer. Where she wore a mauve suit.
Her favorite color of flower was mauve.