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Dear Ollie Bear,
Today is Monday, which means another week has gone by. We miss you so much now, so much more than before. Tonight I started to think how life was maybe starting to be a little more normal… and then I collapsed in on myself, because there is no normal.
Normal would mean having you here with us to hold and watch football with and sing to and read to. Your not being here is the complete opposite of normal. It simply isn’t POSSIBLE for there to be a world without our Ollie. But every day we wake up the impossible is still here. A world without your smiles and giggles and awesome hair… it’s not the world I know.
I was thinking about our last Sunday together. It so happened that I was able to sit beside you on the couch for a couple of hours while we watched Lost with Momma and Daddy. I still feel guilty about that. I wish it had been one of them. But I did my best Ollie. I rubbed your back for probably two hours straight. Often my arm started to hurt and I thought about stopping, but how could I stop? It was all for you. I’m so glad, eternally, forever, immensely glad that I never stopped rubbing your back. I miss you so much little buddy.
We all miss you so much.
Alexa recently asked her readers where we live. Is it home? Is it a house? City/Suburb? In her follow-up post she wrote about the places she has lived in the past and asked again for reader input.
Well.
Until I was around 8 years old I grew up, literally, in a trailer park. I realized this is not common knowledge when, relating a childhood story to Neil and Bekka the other day, Neil commented that the only thing that could make the story better was if we lived in a trailer. We did! We did live in a trailer! I remember a few things from that period… my friend Loretta a few trailers down, trying to dig a hole to hell in the side yard, looking for the end of the rainbow, the barber-pole-striped swingset.
When my parents bought land in the country (it was country, then) the plot was surrounded by woods (there were woods, at that time). We moved the trailer out to the land until my parents could afford to build a house on the same property. The folks hired to transport our HOME dropped it into the ditch in the front yard. It is disconcerting, as a child, to see your house tipped over on its SIDE in what should be the front yard. My father had to call friends and relatives to come dig our trailer out of the ditch. I think my mom is still traumatized by that day.
The house went up behind the trailer when I was 9 or 10. It was THRILLING to come home from school every day and see the house being built right before my very eyes. We played all over the construction site. It was fabulous.
I loved growing up where I did. The house was surrounded by woods on all sides and the lots across the street were lake-side lots, so if we made friends with the neighbors we could go swimming and fishing. The woods we explored like little lost children. We mapped them out: Tree City, Moss Land, That Place where the Liquor Bottles and Target Practice Show Up. I had a favorite dogwood tree that I could climb up into and be hidden. When the wind blew it was like sitting in a rocking chair. I wrote a lot of poetry and read a lot of Judy Blume in that tree.
I remember one day I found a nest of turtle eggs after a good rain storm. The next day I dragged my little sister out to see them. No turtle eggs. Years later I wrote this haiku about the incident:
Come see! Turtle Eggs!
Watch our for that fat black snake.
Oh. Damn. Let’s go home.
The house sat on a hill and we carved a marvelously bumpy bike trail that swooped down the big hill, into a gully at the base, and POPPED you back up on the other side, where the street was. Later I would practice not tipping over on the riding lawnmower while I mowed the same gully.
There was a dry creek bed in the woods and in places the bank could be rather tall, steep, and muddy. We attached a rope to the base of a tree overlooking the bank and practiced our “mountain climbing” by using the rope to scale the muddy bank.
When I was 12 or so I planted a plum tree sapling and a rose bush cutting in our front yard. Last year my mom delivered bushels and bushels of fresh plums to her friends. The rose petals we used in my wedding. All in all, I would wish no less for my own kids.
