Legacies. (Original writing)

Legacies is a collection of three short stories and a poem, each of which explores, in its own way, the gifts, both good and bad, that pass from one generation to the next--family tales and eccentricities, secrets and silences, passion and dysfunction, and, ultimately, the wish for unconditional love. In "Kerosene and Cabbage," the narrator remembers her Polish grandmother, and the mysteries and misfits that color her ethnic background. Voices haunt the narrator of "Orphan of the Storm" as she begins to integrate the desolate memories of her childhood with her present day predicament. In "The Legacy," a long story in two parts, a woman and her lover learn of her great-uncle's secret life, and thus hear, for the first time, the truth behind his legacy of silence.