Stella’s Barn

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Trouble woke me up early. Only two years old, my first memory: startled from sleep, I follow my mother to the road where she covers with old burlap a dead dog, just run over. My world was frightening and tough, from the beginning. Polish Catholic, my harsh paternal grandmother ruled our house. The men were there to eat and sleep. Alcohol, incest the norm in our neighborhood. With just the clothes on our back, one night Ma spirited us all away to her mother’s small subsistence farm in the country where I woke up to imagine I had died and found myself in the Garden of Eden. Plants, animals, fishing in the old muddy river across the railroad tracks: here I could dream! All short-lived when we moved again into our barn-like house of stark poverty and deprivation. I learned from my mother how to ride the rapids, how to grab onto the sides of life’s often flimsy, careening boat. Catastrophe visited us, but you will see how our story, my hope, survived.