"Jaysus"

The kitchen table had huge brown legs, carved with vertical grooves from top to bottom. It was the centerpiece of the kitchen, and was set back against the far wall, just far enough from the outside wall to make enough room for my grandmother's chair, where she could usually be found with her bowl of tea. Never a teacup, but a certain grayish white bowl banded with a green stripe. I was little then so the table legs were a prominent feature of the room, being small enough that the legs were what were in my line of vision. But not on this day. My brother and I wanted to see what was going on atop the table. So we backed up against the far kitchen wall near the kitchen door and next to the slopjar by the sink that had no drainage, craning our necks, trying to figure out what was going on with all the activity involved in making the tabletop ready for something. We knew something different was going on, or at least that's what we suspected. My grandmother's bedroom was off to the right of the kitchen, and that's where the activity seemed to be centered. Somebody, I think it was Helen, came out of the bedroom with a bundle in her arms and put it on the table. That's where memory becomes cloudy, though I think I recall somebody picking me up later and showing me what the table top held. I don't think I had any sort of epiphany: kids weren't told much in those days, and I was only 18 months old. I don't think I remember hearing the words so my mother must have told me, probably much later, that Nanny had said, on her first look at Dorothy, " Oh, Jaysus, the baby has red hair!" (It's all too true, that for most of my life, I never knew what was going on until it was over.)