The Mostly True Story of Tanner and Louise

by Colleen Oakley

If there was anything worse in life than a man telling you to calm down when you were upset, she didn’t know what it was.

“Why is it called a grandfather clock and not a grandmother clock?” her eldest granddaughter, Poppy, asked once. “Because only a man would find the need to announce it every time he performed his job as required,” Louise replied.

“This is called conversation. It’s what we used to do before cell phones ruined it.”

She knew kids, daughters especially, took all the anger, frustration, world-weariness out on their mothers because they could. Because mothers would always love them—even at their worst.

but the love of a sister was as constant as the sun. You might not feel its rays every day, but it was always there.

“Sometimes it just feels like we still spend so much time trying to teach the house not to catch on fire, instead of teaching the arsonist not to light it.”