#charon diane – charondiane

Well finally, after 5 years of dealing with my health condition I feel both the strength and motivation, enough so that I can invest the time marketing my novelette, Two Little Girls.

I hear that this is when the real work begins. After all, the words came pouring out of me and in less than two weeks I had written a book!

I, the youngest member of my family of 12, was living alone in the old family house when in 2010 I was surprised with a visit from an older relative. The family was recently reduced in size by the passing of its three elder members; my maternal aunt, my father and then my mother. Visiting today was the only remaining relative of my parents’ generation, a generation that thought it not only polite, but quite necessary to “come calling” on extended family.

I remember that whenever he came to call, Simon brought something very special into their lives. A world seemed to form around them built upon their recollections and bursts of laughter that would not be contained. They were almost childlike, one out-doing the other with what they remembered of the past. I so enjoyed seeing my parents this way as I can think of nothing to provoke such abandonment of parental restraint as Simon’s visits. But today he’d come to visit with me. I was thrust into connecting with him as one adult to another.

It was odd as we two sat in Mother’s living room; very odd as there was nothing of the bond they shared to carry the two of us along. And I cannot remember anything passing between us beyond a smile or a brief admonishment for some small thing about me he took pride in correcting, for my own good.

It wasn’t long before he told me the news, that my grandparent’s farm had been sold to a developer. The house, the barn, the smokehouse, everything was gone.

I couldn’t move. I never thought that it would be destroyed; perhaps renovated beyond recognition but not that it wouldn’t be there in some form for me to visit whenever I chose to do so.

Instantly it seemed the earth around me fell away and I was standing on a small bit looking out with no point of reference. In an attempt to hold on to what I remembered, a story evolved to include all that remained with me of my grandparents farm in Virginia and my visit with them in the summer of 1957.