Up from the ground a daisy grew by the border of the fence behind the house . A house where there floated a pale cloud , an umbrella of protection , above its roof . A roof under which lived a family of two parents and three children . A bedroom of yellow papered walls faced the front street of Clover Drive . Walls where sunshine illuminated thru the wooden louvered window shutters . Shutters that opened and closed with the changing shadows of a childhood world . And sometimes opened to other rooms in other houses like Polaroid snapshots of landscapes far in the distance .

 

 

The mother wore a hat in the garden as she knelt to pick the weeds and made the flowers look like concert choir girls all in perfect rows . And behind the garden , the pasture that was the grandparents land extended along the other properties of homes along the avenue and around onto the Main Street where the old Tudor house was like a castle uprooted from Europe . The house showcased like a movie billboard its wide beams , cut glazed windows , with an expansive front yard of tall pines and a faded awning over the entrance to the shed to the side of the cement shuffleboard court . And the barn down the hill , a Medieval stage of scented hay , leather saddles , horse blankets and wooden beams to perform on .

 

 

And in the field adjoining these two houses of this world , the dad , I adored , who wore wingtip shoes and handsome suits during the day , would sometimes dig a hole in the rich manured earth and place coals of fire around tin foiled potatoes or water soaked husks of corn to eat late in the night . The night before the nightmare of great dread would fall from the cloudless sky above . All because my brother showed me the sewer rat . A rat so ugly and huge that fled in and out of the metal grating in the street by the mailbox . The shutters stayed shut for weeks out of fear of catching site of the monster from the window .

 

 

And the roller skating stopped in front of the house and the key used to tighten and loosen them onto the shoes was put on a chord and hung around my neck as I fingered it now out of a nervous habit until the silver shone clear like the inside of an oyster shell .

 

 

Amelia , my sister , knew none of this as she hadn’t been born yet and a lot can happen and change in a decade or even in a moment . The world in the sun can change to one in the mist and a smiling row of daiseys into a weeping meadow of weeds . The year is 1959 and I am eight years old . My grand mother died , I was given a puppy for Christmas , Walt Disney released Sleeping Beauty , Elvis Presley hit the charts , Ringo Starr received his first drum set , the Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City and Alaska and Hawaii became states . And on the other side of the world in Communist Bulgaria , in the forced labor camps at the edge of the Balkan Mountains , the prisoners led a hunger strike . A hunger strike that many were unaware of or even of the camps existence . But for those that did , it was a place from where one might never emerge alive . And so , side by side , lived an elegy of paradox staged into future events of which Amelias’ history would be perplexed to uncover .

 

 

to to be continued ……

 

” Memory is the scribe of the soul “.        Aristotle

 

Personal note : I’m not sure just where this story is going ….. only that I want to continue writing it ….. and in working the flow of it into blogs helps to encourage and inspire me not to stop .