Saturday, October 27, 2012

Mirror in the Night


How I came to be in the favorite part of my boyhood home remains a mystery, but the basement looked exactly as I remember it.  A cavernous, liberating space with a ping-pong table and two steel support poles painted fire-engine red, speckled asbestos floor tiles and concrete walls painted a cheery yellow. Travel posters graced the walls at eight-foot intervals along the west side, glued in place with wallpaper paste by my father decades before. The posters depicted places my parents had never visited—Mexico, Spain, Paris, Rome. Cliché vistas of the Arc de Triomphe, a bullfight and the tower of Pisa. We had never traveled as a family beyond the Wisconsin Dells, so these windows to the world made me smile, but saddened me to think of all the unrealized adventures that had been dreamt in this playful subterranean space.


To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.



Monday, October 22, 2012

The Pool

The balcony was solid and large, built to Hank’s specifications years earlier. He looked out over the backyard from his cantilevered vantage point, across the pressure-treated bench and safety railing. Memories sputtered for air as they raced to the bubbling surface of his new perspective. The swimming pool was gone.

He remembered assembling treads and risers on a hand cut wooden frame, lifting completed stairs into place with the help of friends. Anchored between the balcony and a lower deck, the stairway was firmly shoehorned between the other wooden structures. Each step he took toward ground level accompanied a change in elevation that renewed his perspective of the changed yard and the missing pool.


To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.