Searching Low

     I guess he never heard the complete expression, "Search high and low."  This morning a car was parked in our driveway with 2 kids in it.  Turns out the father had placed his wallet on top of the car and driven off, the wallet flying off and spewing the contents. He found his wallet, but the stuff was gone, including his driver's license, said the son. The man was gone quite a while, searching most intensively at last week's accident scene, where there's still a lot of torn up earth.  I saw the man as he approached his car, looking down into the ditches.  (Poison ivy is prevalent alongside the road, so I hope he recognized it.)  I went back into the house and didn't stay until he got back to his car, but I would have told him to look UP the bank.  Paper products scatter up, even into the trees when so thrust by passing cars.  Men can't find anything anyway.

Way past childhood years...

  The last time I saw the twin with the bandana sling, years and years past childhood days, was at the sad occasion of his brother's funeral.  Reminiscing just a little, he had no memory of the broken arm on his moving in day; he said too many other things had been broken since then.  He did remember the time he rode Dr. Sproat's Guernsey cow and crashed right through my mother's garden fence.  There were no horses around, only cows, and cowboys gotta ride. 

Moving In....

   The news spread to our front porch, focal point for all the kids on our street and down the lane.  A new family was moving in, just a few houses down on River Road.  The previous family had moved out, (a young couple I suppose .)  All we knew then was that the woman, Helene C. was rather pretty and had a baby, which was of little  interest to us kids, and that she was terrified of cats and even kittens, which we found slightly more interesting.  Anyway, that family was gone.  The question now among us kids was did the new family have kids? 
    Various trips down the street to surveille the newcomers revealed the presence of a teenage girl, pretty but too old, and a boy about 12 years old, just past the veil of childhood, so we 10 and under's knew he wouldn't be part of our front porch assembly, counting cars and playing 20 Questions, et al. Another little boy, barely out of toddler-hood, way too young.   So our attention focused on 2 young boys who we later found out were twins, a few years younger than I was, but still within the bracket of childhood.  It's not possible at age 10 and 11 to know how fleeting that category is to be.  But at the time, that's all we cared about---more kids to join our games.
    Even more intriguing, one of the twins wore his arm in a sling, of the red bandana type, so he definitely was a contender.  He told us later that he'd fallen out of a tree and broken his arm.  At that time, the outdoors was the center of childhood play, and the games were primarily based on Cowboys and (yes) Indians or Cops and Robbers.  A bandana slung arm could have qualified on either count, so we had high hopes.  And we kids were not disappointed.  The twins were full of life and energy, and were always at the porch, either for the store or our house.  As was true of all the kids then, no invitations, no obligations, no expectations.  Just hang out, any time, any weather, and see what happens.
  

Cleaning house

   Sorting through the detritus of years, I came across a notebook holding a collection of my writing assignments over the years, including that posted previously.  In ninth grade, we read "Evangeline," the Epic poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and were assigned to write a one-page summary of it, which is the above post.  My paper was graded 100, but it left me with a lot of questions.  So I reread the poem, and when it's called Epic, that does indeed mean epic; there are 2 Parts and each has 5 (V), lengthy Cantos, written in dactylic hexameter form.   Longfellow must have spent a good portion of his days fitting his tale into poetic meter:  "This is the forest primeval."  
     I'm sure I read the entire poem because it was assigned, and when I was 13 and 14 years old, I always did my homework, and especially in English class.  That's probably how I know that a kirtle is a skirt because Evangeline wore a blue kirtle, and how I knew that Loup-garou inhabits forests, and that the White Letiche is a fearful spirit.  But I'm pretty sure I didn't understand at that age that the British were  not the only villains in the evacuation of Acadie, and that other political components came into play.  But this is Longfellow's fictional account, his poem, so he is not entirely responsible for the misrepresentation of history his poem inspired. 
    I'm equally sure that I was nowhere near understanding the full meaning when I read back then about Gabriel's death after a lifetime of the two lovers searching for each other, to be re-united only at death.  "Sweet was the light of his eye, but it suddenly sank into darkness as when a lamp is blown out by a gust of wind at a casement. "
   I can't fault my teenaged self  for lack of insight. It is not possible to fully comprehend love, life and loss until you yourself have traveled, "bleeding and barefooted over the shards and thorns of existence."

Disambiguation

     Evangeline was a young girl who lived with her grandfather in the French village of Grand Pre.  She was very beautiful and fair and all the young men in the village worshipped her, but only Gabriel Lajeunesse, the son of Basil the village blacksmith, was welcome.  They had been brought up together and as children they had been schooled by Father Felician, the town priest.
    One day the village and all its belongings were taken away to a foreign land.  Gabriel and Evangeline were parted and, to add to the hardship, Benedict Bellefontaine died of a broken heart at leaving his beloved home.  During the journey, Evangeline and Gabriel never saw each other.
    After many years of searching for her beloved Gabriel, Evangeline became a Sister.  One day during a dreadful epidemic of fever, Evangeline was caring for the sick when all at once she saw the dying form of Gabriel. She went to him and laid his head on her lap.  Gabriel opened his eyes and tried to speak her name and then he died.  Evangeline looked up with tears in her eyes and said "Oh Lord, I thank thee."
                                           "The Great Upheaval"      
                                    

BLOG: Off

    I started my blog to take the place of conversation.  Simple as that.  It was an attempt to reach out to those in the past, many of them now lost to me, most, probably, no longer living.  Recount the stuff of daily life, to try to connect with those who were in your life.  Like Thornton Wilder offered, don't pick a monumental happening, but an ordinary day.  Pick one of the times a 10-year-old  Roger V. shinnied about twenty feet up Sara's signpost, lightbulb in hand,  so her sign would be lighted up again.  Then listen that evening to the splat of the insects as they zithered into that lightbulb.  Nothing very important or memorable about that, but here it is stuck in my mind so many years later.  Or choose the summer days when Dorothy and Johnny Daurio played Parcheesi on the deck of the front porch for what seemed like hours, all summer long, an eternal game.  No one paid any attention as they sprawled, in  innocent concentration.  Certainly not me, I would have thought, but there's the picture, etched in my memory. 
     And so, in blog world, I've entered these hundreds of posts, trying to establish what life was like, back when we lived it.   A vain effort, unless as in "Our Town,"  the writer is skilled enough to draw you in behind and beyond the meaning of the words.  Anecdotes and remembrances over seven decades, from the delights of childhood to the inevitable track of sorrows along the path of life, were meant to be just that and not intended to be filtered through to detect concealed motives.  The time has come to end this blog.  Two truths survive:  The heart can feel as it it's bleeding. Soft and spongy sorrow can turn into cold and hard resentment.   NB: to be deleted.
  ***Back by popular demand.  Requests poured in by the three's.

Finale

  It's 4:00 a.m. and I just got up and looked out the bedroom window as a car was passing by.  My first thought was that the headlights made the lawn look as if it were covered with snow, silvery and cold in appearance.  Now who would I share that thought with but this blog.  No person would care to hear, no one in my present life anyhow.