Back-to-School Weather

The night of Irene, under the threat of tornadoes and ninety mile an hour winds, the kids and I slept in the basement.   We awoke in the dark.  We climbed up the basement stairs and guessed at how long the power had been out and made coffee with boiling water poured over a sieve of coffee grinds. 

In the evening, my husband and I went out to assess neighborhood damage and to bring home ice cream in celebration of power restored.  Irene had hurled walnuts and sweet gum pods to the street.  There were branches and leaves: ginkgo and maple and oak.  Beneath the footbridge, the water, smelling faintly of the ocean, gurgled past.  Someone had moved the feral cats’ food bowl from the woods to higher, dryer ground.   

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Affected

This essay was written in response to a prompt from the red dress club:

“This week we would like you to write about how the show of affection has played a part in your memory.

Choose a time when either the abundance or lack of affection (either by you or someone else) stands out, and show us.  Bring us to that time.  Help us feel what you felt.”

Of course, being a word nerd, I turned to my beat-up college dictionary (Webster’s New World) before starting:

1.    A mental or emotional state or tendency; disposition or feeling

2.    Fond or tender feelings, warm liking

3.    A disease; ailment

4.    An attribute or property of a thing

5.    An affecting or being affected

 I think I’ve got definition two covered.  Possibly number five.  Maybe a tinge of three if you look up the word on line.

Anyway, I was really going for a kid’s POV here, as something else I’m writing is written from the perspective of a youngster.

Affected

I was in the third grade.  I wore new baby blue corduroy pants with an elastic waistband and a matching jacket sewn by my mother at the dining room table.  One by one, the teacher called the students to her desk to retrieve their math tests.  Perhaps the tests were in order by grade.  Or alphabetically.  Or maybe they were arranged by row because he passed me on his way to get his paper.

He looked at his test.

His face crumbled in upon itself like a half-eaten apple left to dry in the sun.  He was close to tears.  But in a split second, anger replaced despair.  He snatched the paper from the teacher’s hand and stormed back down the row.  His paper was in his right hand, his pencil in his left.

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When Ricky Sneezed

I attended elementary school with this boy named Ricky.  I remember that Ricky had black hair and black eyes and, if memory serves, he was fond of wearing tee shirts printed with race cars.  But what I most remember about Ricky is that he had a dangerous sneeze. 

Ricky’s sneeze was always sudden and unexpected.  It shot from out of nowhere and made his classmates jump in surprise and caused the teacher to roll her eyes and pause in her struggle to teach her disinterested third graders long division.

“Ricky” she would sigh, setting down her chalk and rubbing at her temples.

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