” Seven Things I Know to be True,” by Jim Tomlinson

1. Red is the color my brother doesn’t see. If he were to look at this old photo, he’d think your blouse was a faded grey-green. When we were young, he’d insist on swapping golf tees with me, his reds for my whites or yellows. For years he didn’t say why.

2. Hammersmith Farm was the family cottage to which young Jackie Bouvier often came in summer. In a nearby Newport church, in fact, she married Jack Kennedy. His presidential helicopter sometimes landed on Hammersmith’s long west lawn, and the couple’s young daughter, arms outstretched, would race down that long grassy slope to greet her arriving father, the image captured by ready photographers.

3. It was fifteen years before the day you cartwheeled across Hammersmith’s sunlit lawn that I first met your mother, this at a Newport dance. We’d stay married thirteen years more.

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