Completely Hatstand
They hadn't spoken for decades; my great aunt H utterly refused to have anything to do with her sister, G.

The catalyst for the feud had been the division of property in their father's will. I can only assume that G had come off the better for it, because she would try to make contact with her sister from time to time. H, for her part, took pride in her impunity to these advances. "I saw that the letter had a Harwich postmark," I once heard her saying. "Now, there's only one person I know who lives in Harwich, so I tore it up immediately." She seemed to relish telling us that.

The attitude sat ill with the H that I knew: a conservative, slightly eccentric, slightly distant, but ultimately loving spinster aunt who kept jelly babies around her house in preparation for visits from her nephews and neices during the holidays.

Their father - my great-grandfather - had died in the early 1970s; this means that there had been about two decades of resentment and silence between them.

I once asked what, precisely, it had been that had divided the two. Was it something of great monetary value? (Unlikely, but you never know.) Was it something of great artistic or historical value? Nope.

Noone seemed to know, or care, what it was that had divided them. Noone else thought at the time that whatever it was had been in the slightest bit important. But from what members of my family could remember, and from what I could tell, these two sisters had not communicated for two decades, and remained in a state of sullen resentment, because of an argument over the inheritance of a hat-stand.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Mon 16 Nov 2009, 10:23, Reply)