Reply #116: Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen

[Sisaruus]

"For forty-seven years they had been married. How deep back the stubborn, gnarled roots of the quarrel reached, no one could say -- but only now, when tending to the needs of others no longer shackled them together, the roots swelled up visible, split the earth between them, and the tearing shook even to the children, long since grown."

--from "Tell Me a Riddle" which received the O. Henry first prize for best American short story in 1961.

From Wikipedia:
Tillie Lerner Olsen (January 14, 1912–January 1, 2007)<1> was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen