Tag: childhood (Page 1 of 2)

Image of author as young girl — Photo courtesy of author

Lucky Girl

1 April 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Carol E. Anderson

It’s 1950. I’m three years old, standing in our backyard next to a patch of wildflowers as tall as I am. My tiny right fist peaks out from the sleeve of my oversized double-breasted coat with crisscrossing lapels. Chubby knees extend into sturdy legs that lead to small feet housed in white anklet socks and polished white tennis shoes. Whisps of blonde hair flow back in the wind. My bangs, short and choppy, look like I took the shears to them myself. Atop my head is a tiny woolen cap.

My face is turned up. Eyes squint as I smile at my mom with the camera—my gleeful expression punctuated by a slight suggestion of a dimple in my left cheek. I’m anticipating something wonderful. The zoo? The circus? A birthday party?

I’m unaware that by the end of my fifth year, my father will suffer a visual disability wrought by incompetent doctors. He will never work again. My mother, a secretary, will numb her fingers typing away in a tiny cubicle to support our family, working for a boss half as smart as she. I will wish her to be like all the other moms and stay at home, fix me snacks after school, and teach me how to ride a bike. My brother will withdraw into a world of thoughts and books. We will never be friends.

Standing on the lawn in my miniature peacoat, I don’t realize that by the time I’m fifteen, I’ll be rejected by the Baptist church for loving a woman. I’ll begin to understand the word hypocrite. I’ll believe my parents’ teachings of love, kindness, generosity, and fairness are principles everyone strives to live by—tenets issued by God. I won’t know these tenets have exclusionary clauses invisible to innocent eyes, that I will witness Christian fundamentalism grow in twisted power and gird its flocks to act with naked cruelty on the belief that difference is a sin.

I don’t realize that at the age of twenty-one, I’ll be outed by my college classmates, introducing terror into my daily life. I’ll be astonished that all my efforts to guard this secret are as useless as a sheet of transparent tissue paper.

I am unaware that at age twenty-six, in my attempt to be straight, my boyfriend will dump me on our six-week road trip to be with a woman he met at his brother’s wedding the week before—and he will not repay the $800 he owes me.

Looking up at the camera without knowledge of the need for hope, I don’t know that my father will die one month before my twenty-eighth birthday, and that I’ll survive—that I will remain wrapped in the shimmering cords of his love even decades after he’s gone.

I am unaware that at age thirty-two I’ll start my own business as an organizational consultant and will coach leaders to inspire people rather than control them—that this work will help me understand the complexity of human beings, and their scars.

I don’t know that on my fiftieth birthday I’ll start a non-profit called Rebellious Dreamers to lift up women to reclaim their dreams—that it will last twenty-five years and eventually fund microloans for women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

I don’t realize that when I turn fifty-four, I’ll meet my great love, each of us destined for the other, that knowing her will smooth the jagged edges of terror and loss, that we will build a home on nine acres of land surrounded by trees and be rich in our chosen family of friends.

Standing with my beloved, in our own garden now, I’m anticipating something wonderful.

Carol E. Anderson is a life coach whose passions are travel and photography. She holds a doctorate in spiritual studies, and an MFA in creative nonfiction. She is the author of You Can’t Buy Love Like That: Growing Up Gay in the Sixties. Carol lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

suddenly the third day of spring

1 March 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Cecil Morris

laugh splashing
it is raining
but the sun is out and bright
and somewhere a rainbow
must be refracting missiles of light
must be fracturing tears
and the neighbor children
all three dark-haired slips in single digits
are outside and laughing
and squealing and opening their mouths
and pointing erupting glee
rain with sunshine
big juicy flashing drops
wetting their bare arms
darkening their dark heads
hearty fat drops smacking
sun-warmed concrete
with satisfying, cartoonish splats
the best of everything
how little it takes
to engender joy
laugh flashing

Cecil Morris retired after 37 years of teaching high school English and now tries writing himself what he spent so many years teaching others to understand and (maybe) enjoy. He has poems appearing in Ekphrastic Review, Hole in the Head Review, Rust + Moth, Willawaw Journal, and other literary magazines. Read his earlier poem Some Kinder Resolutions for a Better Year in The Bluebird Word.

Angel

1 February 2024 / Editor

Fiction by Paul Hadella

“You can say sorry all you want about breaking the lamp,” Mom said at the top of her lungs, “but this isn’t about breaking the lamp.” Then she stomped out of our apartment and slammed the door.

I asked Vince, “What’s she mean? If she’s not mad at us for breaking the lamp, then what’s she mad about?”

“Maybe she meant it’s about the money,” he said.

“The money?” I said.

“That now she has to buy us a new lamp,” my brother said, “and she doesn’t have the money. She never has the money for anything.”

“Do we really need the lamp?” I asked.

“I guess so,” said Vince. “I don’t know.” Then he asked me what I thought she meant.

“Beats me,” I said. “That’s why I asked you.”

“Could be she’s just mad because we’re boys, and boys play rough,” Vince said. “She really wanted girls. How many times has she told us that?”

I said, “She’s just teasing us when she says that.”

“Just teasing?” Vince grumbled. “Get real.”

Anyway, I’m not blaming the broken lamp all on Vince. It’s true, though, that I didn’t start it. He was the one who brought home the tennis racket with two busted strings. He found it on the grass outside Building Five. “It was just laying there,” he told me.

“What good is it?” I asked him.

“Watch,” he said. Then he went into the kitchen and came back with a sponge, just a bit damp, so it had some weight. Then he started whacking the sponge around the living room, using the racket like a hockey stick. “You be the goalie,” he told me.

We slid the coffee table against the wall and made it the goal. Then things got a little out of hand.

Mom walked through the door, home from work, about five minutes after we broke the lamp. She saw we were picking up the pieces.

Right away, Vince said to her, “Sorry for breaking the lamp.” I said it next. Mom tried plugging her temper but couldn’t. She yelled that thing about it not being about the lamp, then left me and my brother standing there in the living room, our heads down.

It wasn’t the first time Mom has stomped out of the apartment. It’s happened, I think, five other times. So me and Vince know how to handle it by now. First, we give Mom about fifteen minutes to cool down before we go get her and bring her back. We know where she’ll be. She walks down to the pond behind the apartment buildings, sits on a bench, and stares at the water.

Here’s how it usually goes.

First, when Mom hears us coming, she scoots to the middle of the bench. That gives me room to sit on one side of her and Vince on the other.

Then I take one of her hands, and Vince takes the other.

Then we all sit there and watch the water for a few minutes. None of us says anything.

Then I tell her I love her. Vince says it next. He should go first, because he’s older, but he always waits for me.

Then we promise we’ll try to behave better, and not make her life so rough.

Then we ask her to please come back home because we can’t live without her.

Then she kisses both of us on the cheek, and we walk back to our apartment together. Mom might even crack a joke or two to show there’s no hard feelings.

That’s how it usually goes—but that’s not how it went yesterday, after we broke the lamp. Not exactly. Yesterday, when me and Vince got to the edge of the parking lot behind Building Ten, we saw Mom down by the pond, just like we expected. She was even sitting on the same bench she always sits on.

Yesterday, though, she wasn’t there alone. She had company. Not a person—but a big white swan. There’s a bunch of swans that live at the pond. Yesterday, all but this one were out on the water, cruising around like little ships. They plowed right through the creases the breeze was making. This other one, though, was sitting on the grass, facing Mom, about ten yards from her and the bench. It looked white as an angel.

Even from where me and Vince had stopped, at the edge of the parking lot, we could tell Mom was talking to the swan. Talking and talking. Her hands moving to her words. You could bet she was telling the swan about our hockey game that got a little out of hand. I could almost hear her saying, “But it isn’t about breaking the lamp.”

The swan bobbed its head up and down as Mom talked. It was like an angel telling Mom, “Yeah, I get exactly what you’re saying, and I take pity on you.”

It even opened its wings and flapped them a couple of times—which made it look even more like an angel—a mighty angel. Maybe by flapping its wings it was giving Mom a blessing.

I spent a year in Catholic school, second grade—which is probably why I saw an angel and Vince just saw a swan. Vince has always gone to public school. He did think of something, though, that didn’t cross my mind. He said, “That swan must be a she.”

Paul Hadella is a journalist, creative writer and musician, living in Ohio. “Angel” is from a series of stories about his childhood on Long Island, New York.

The Walk to Ma’s House

17 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Diane Funston

Walking to my great-grandmother’s house after fifth and sixth grade once a week–I remember so clearly, see it right in front of me. Out of the old brick Lincoln school number 22 off Joseph Avenue. Turning right towards downtown, you could see the huge Baptist Church way at the end of the avenue, Xerox Tower beyond that.

My memory is always winter. This was a magical journey in winter. I remember huge soft snowflakes falling, the air cold but very fresh. Catching snowflakes on my tongue, on my fluffy mittens. It was almost like a Christmas card.

Passing Bodner Bakery on my right, the scent of fresh pastries and breads wafted out the door and smelled of warmth and love. Prune rugalach, challah, black and white cookies, sliced seeded rye in the slicer.

Blanks Market was next, a sausage shop with all the German wurst we would buy on Saturday. Sausages and hams hung in the big front window. Slabs of bacon in the case, along with homemade sauerkraut and potato salad. Across the street was Schmidts Market, a butcher who also made sauerkraut, sold in cardboard containers like Chinese food comes in. Schmidts also sold fresh ground round my grandmother used to make gahochtus, raw beef with onions, egg, and seasoning served on pumpernickel bread. Delicious.

I went past the fish market where whole fish with staring eyeballs looked out from the case. On Friday the place was alive and jumping with people lined up to buy take-out fish fry. Farther along was the Bareis Shoe store with Buster Brown and his dog Tige on a hanging sign. Saddle shoes were in the window, and black patent leather shoes. On a winter day there were lacy snowflakes glittering in the display window.

Next on my walk, right at the corner of Wilkins Street where I turned left to walk to Ma’s house was a tombstone engraver with monuments in the yard and samples of engraving in the window. Beautiful rose granite and white marble you just had to run your hand over on the way by. A gorgeous black wrought iron fence kept people away from the stones.

Walking up the street I pass rows of houses mostly from the 1920s like Ma’s house. Some are multi-family, large homes referred to as Boston style with big front porches, even on the upstairs units. The single family houses are mostly small cottage style. Nothing ornate about them architecture-wise. Small backyards, many with fenced front yards with gardens. I pass lots of roses wrapped for the winter, lilac bushes, barberry shrubs and a lot of city street trees that are maples or chestnuts. A few spruce trees and juniper bushes add green and blue to the stark landscape.

At last I arrive at my great-grandmother’s house. Up three steps then four into the small front porch and inside. I smell the chicken vegetable soup simmering on the old 1930s Magic Chef stove. I hug Ma, and she kisses me on both cheeks. She is 80, white hair in a tight bun held in place with barrettes. She has glasses, wears a tiny floral print dress covered by an apron. Her feet wear black, heavy shoes that lace up.

We talk about school and I have coffee and windmill cookies with her. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was ten. It’s a very German tradition to have coffee and a sweet around three or four in the afternoon. After my snack I help her dust. The living room has dark navy blue velvet and wicker furniture. There is a humidor where my great-grandfather kept cigars. I don’t remember him; he died when I was a year old. There is wallpaper in the living and dining rooms. The woodwork is dark stained oak.

The kitchen is painted a very light pink. Gray Formica covers the lower half of the walls like wainscoting. The refrigerator is very old with a tiny freezer and a handle that pulled toward you to open up. Westinghouse, I remember. A key-wound Art Deco clock kept time in the kitchen, it’s loud pendulum swung back and forth. A big rocking chair is in the middle of the large kitchen. The cat, Topper, on the cushion, sleeping.

Before supper I shovel a little path by the back door and sprinkle some rock salt. Both Ma and the neighbor Mable have luscious perennial gardens that bloom crazy in other seasons. The other neighbor Willy has a beautiful garden and a pond with goldfish that winter over.

We eat supper, the hot soup with little oyster crackers. She does a funny thing with her dentures where they jut out of her mouth then back in again. I feel very cared for and loved by my great-grandma and my grandma. I loved going to her house every week. It gave warmth to the winter, the walk over so full of all of the senses. It was a time of innocence, where I could be a young girl who didn’t have to have all the answers.

Diane Funston was born and raised in Rochester, New York, and currently lives in Marysville, CA. Diane has worked with adults with disabilities her entire working life. Besides emerging as a writer, Diane enjoys beading, hiking, her family, and her dogs.

The Radiator

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Charlene Stegman Moskal

My winter years speak softly.
The aroma of chicken soup
mixes with the slightly metallic
scent of steam hissing warmth from a radiator
in a pre-war building in Sunnyside, Queens.

I am looking out a second story window—
snow has fallen through the night.
My gravel playground transformed;
sleds zooming down a silent hill,
snowsuits, runny noses, frozen finger tips
in gloves with ice crystals to suck
until a pall overtakes the streets.
Cold loses its Macintosh Apple crisp bite,
angels melt into nothingness,
streets now perilous with black ice and slush.

There were magazines with pictures
of places that stayed white
dotted with dark green pine trees,
under skies the blue of my mother’s eyes,
where one ice skated on frozen ponds
ringed by white capped mountains;
places so dry, so cold that a child
would look pink-skinned healthy all winter.

I wanted to be that rosy cheeked girl
but I always returned to a second floor apartment
where the aroma of chicken soup mixed
with the slightly metallic scent of steam from a radiator
that hissed out familiarity, comfort and love
in a pre-war building in Sunnyside, Queens.

Charlene Stegman Moskal is published in numerous anthologies, print and online magazines. Her chapbooks are One Bare Foot (Zeitgeist Press), Leavings from My Table (Finishing Line Press), Woman Who Dyes Her Hair (Kelsay Books), and a full length poetry manuscript, Running the Gamut (Zeitgeist Press), Fall 2023.

Echo

2 December 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

When the pond froze over
my father and I went out
with our skates and hockey sticks
slung over our shoulders,
trudged through the snow
to the log where we laced up.

He swept the ice clean,
gliding behind a broom
in the brisk air
with the grace of a floating swan.

We spun circles
end to end,
sliced the ice
with newly sharpened blades
in flurries of low, white storms
deking,
zigzagging the puck—
a deft strike
then another
and another—

wooden sticks clacking
against the whir of our blades—
the puck— a lightning bolt
across the glittered surface—

I yelled,
I got this!
Watch out!
SCORE!

Score
score
echoed off the ice
like rumbling thunder
through the winter woods,
where 40 years after,
when I walk by the pond,
it echoes still.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who hikes the Connecticut woods daily, pen and pad in pocket. The outdoors inspires many of her poems. Publications include Comstock, Octillo, Awakenings and Evening Street Reviews, Dash, Slab and Glimpse, among others. She won the 2023 American Writers Review Poetry Contest. Read her poem Wild from The Bluebird Word’s October Issue.

Winter, Snow

28 May 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Luke Nadeau

I am a child of the North,
At the first signs of fall,
It’s like a switch flips,
I’m eager

And by the time those soft, white flakes fall to the ground,
My heart grows tenfold

My skin readily turns pink in that winter chill,
Curious,
That my face should flush the color of spring buds.
When the warmth of longer days is long forgotten,

I recall playing in the snow as a kid,
Making snow angels, snow men,
Doing cartwheels in the snow in my bathing suit,
Then jumping right back into my friend’s hot tub,

But somehow,
In the theater of my mind,
I am not cold

My chest, rather, is warm,
I find solace in these snippets of my past,
Where the biting chill of winter cannot reach me

I wrap myself in the coat of my memories,
Let the scarf of tethered dreams wrap around me,
Keep me safe

With any luck,
I shall never freeze

Luke Nadeau is a student studying Creative Writing at Anoka-Ramsey Community College living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. When they aren’t putting pen to paper, or hands to keyboard, they are trying desperately to find their next big CD.

From One Adult to Another

14 March 2023 / Editor

Poetry by Brian C. Billings

Let’s skip the gifts this Christmas.

Oh, let the children have their boxes
and stockings and weeks of waiting;
they have innocence and energy.

The two of us have jobs.

Why worry once again about
the niceties of equivalent exchange
or dropping hints inside of stores?

How much bric-a-brac can we afford to hoard?

Cracking the ritual might hurt
but not so much as hemorrhaging
money and mind for months.

We’re neither one of us detectives.

I think we can agree upon what’s small
to mean the deepest feeling and allow
the credit cards a chance to cool.

I like a latte. So do you.

To be beyond eighteen should mean
cutting ties with those tyrannical lists
our mothers taught us we should make.

Gifts are hard. Leave penance for the cards.

Brian C. Billings is a professor of drama and English at Texas A&M University-Texarkana. His work has appeared in such journals as Ancient Paths, Antietam Review, Argestes, Confrontation, Evening Street Review, and Poems and Plays. Publishers for his scripts include Eldridge Publishing and Heuer Publishing.

close up dirty door door knob — Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

The Trapped Door

12 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Daniella DiMaggio

When I was a girl, my grandma showed me a trapdoor in our house. She lived in the basement apartment, where the trapdoor was. I want to say that the door was by the staircase or in the alcove where the washer and dryer were, but I truly cannot remember. When you opened the door, there was a red ladder that took you far down into a white room that was filled with wonders that I cannot recall now. In my mind’s eye, it was filled with toys, and it was vaster than vast. It was the universe, ever expanding.

I want to say that I visited this trapdoor multiple times in my childhood. And I want to say that it was not in one single instance that this door disappeared. I want to say that as I continued to visit it, the door became more and more transparent; the handle, at first, difficult to turn, and then impossible to find. I want to say that the square outline of the door slowly faded into the wall.

I have many dreams that I’m somehow journeying through the foundation of my childhood home. In the dream, it doesn’t always look like my childhood home, but I know that’s what it is. There are secret passageways in the walls that allow me to contort and climb through. They don’t do much of anything other than transport me from one room to another.

I’m reminded of when my sister and I were girls sharing a room. We had a large white dresser, it almost reached the ceiling (or maybe I just thought this because I was small), and she used to climb on top of it and crawl across it to my bed. It wasn’t until we were older that we realized how dangerous this was, the top half of the dresser not being nailed down to the bottom half. My sister never realized that she was a precarious leaf on a branch. We laugh about it now.

I sometimes wonder if the trapdoor disappeared or if I disappeared. If I became stuck down there and slowly the wonders just vanished, and one day, a day close to my dying, in a new long lived-in house of my adult years (a house I’ve yet to even meet), I will discover a small square frame with a knob and realize that no one has been looking for me.

Daniella DiMaggio is a recent graduate of the Queens College MFA Program where she studied fiction. She teaches at Queens College and Plaza College.

The Landscape of Childhood

5 March 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Janice Northerns

R-r-r-r-r-d-d-d. That sound, the bumpty-bump-bump of our car passing over the two cattle guards near our rural West Texas farmhouse, framed my childhood. Cattle guards, metal pipe contraptions used in place of a gate across a road, are designed to let vehicles pass through while keeping livestock in; however, they meant much more than that to me.

On the long trips back from town almost 30 miles away, crossing those cattle guards often jolted me out of a sound sleep or a dreamy reverie. But it was a comforting jolt, a rumbling almost home, almost home.

My mother sometimes used the cattle guard as a boundary marker when we went out to play: “Don’t go past the second cattle guard,” she’d warn.

Daddy referred to the cattle guards as landmarks when giving directions: “Turn at the first cattle guard, go across the second one, then take the right fork in the road and you’re there.”

And the cattle guards themselves, all those wide spaces between treacherously smooth metal pipes with looming chasms beneath, presented formidable obstacles to be crossed on foot when I was small. It was a test of bravery to see if we could make it across quickly without having to grab the triangular side rail.

For many years most of the place markers of my childhood remained intact, long after I left home. But I still remember the day when I mourned the absence of one of them. It was on a trip to see my parents, and as usual, when I turned at the first cattle guard, its low rumble whispered almost home, almost home. But as I approached the second cattle guard, I saw that something was not quite right. The road had been filled in, the cattle guard removed.

No more ditch to cross, no more bumpy jolt.

Instead of enjoying the newly smooth blacktop, I had the distinct urge to hang on for dear life as I crossed that spot in the road, as if I were driving across a high, narrow bridge with no guard rails. It was a visceral, physical sensation, one that surprised me. How silly, I thought. It’s just a cattle guard. But there was no denying that this change in my childhood landscape left me momentarily unmoored. This no longer felt like the road home.

My father explained the removal of the cattle guard. It was in need of repair, and since my parents hadn’t owned any livestock for years, there was no longer a reason for a cattle guard. It made more sense to simply fill in the road.

I puzzled over why such a simple change affected me so strongly. Perhaps there was no longer a practical purpose for that cattle guard, but for me it served as a talisman. The bumpty thud of cattle guards marked every entry and exit to and from the larger world, a border crossing into my home country. If the borders, or the border markers, change is there still a country to enter?

Of course, it’s only natural that those external markers of childhood become fewer as time passes. Other changes have happened over the years. The old schoolhouse down the road, empty for many years, was at last removed. Houses of childhood playmates have been gone so long that not even a trace of the foundations remains. My parents are also gone now, and the house where I grew up, though still there, is no longer ours. The cottonwood trees that I played in as a child have been cut down. But those cottonwoods, their leafy green summer stirrings, are as vivid to me now as when I last set eyes on them more than 15 years ago.

Maybe I really don’t need external markers to find my way. The landscape of childhood, far from fading away with the removal of its landmarks, seems indelibly etched on some map of memory:

It is a July day in 1965 and I am not quite nine years old. My little brother and I clutch sweaty nickels and dimes in our palms as we walk to the tiny country store located just around the bend after the second cattle guard.

Barefoot, as always, we race to the first cattle guard, keeping to the side of the road where the dirt is cooler than the blacktop pavement.

At the cattle guard, my feet curve to grip the hot metal pipes as I struggle to keep my balance, hang on to my money and scamper to solid ground. Safely across, only then do I look back and down, down into the ditch my little brother and I have once more successfully traversed.

One more cattle guard and we’re at Halley’s Grocery. The interior of the store is cool and dim. We luxuriate in the cement soothing the blistered soles of our bare feet, sidle up to the Coca-Cola chest cooler and open wide the glass lid for a blast of icy air.

On the way home, we swig cold orange Nehi sodas, a bag of peanuts dumped into them. As I make my way across the last cattle guard, there is no bumpty-bump rumble; I’m on foot.

But the sound is still there, always, in my head. I look up and the house is within sight.

Almost home, almost home.

Janice Northerns is the author of Some Electric Hum, winner of the Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award (University of Kansas), the Nelson Poetry Book Award, and a WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Poetry. The author grew up in Texas and now lives in southwest Kansas. Read more at www.janicenortherns.com.