While sitting on my hammock this evening watching Chloe and Gabriel chase each other around our lightly leaf-strewn back yard, an often-revisited memory dragged itself back to the surface of my consciousness. In the months following my father’s death, my mom made every effort to sort of bring the family together. There were gifts and trips that I remember. My brothers were old enough that they decided not to participate, but my sisters were up for it. My mom decided that the big family trip that summer was going to be a vacation to [url=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sebago_Lake]Sebago Lake[\/url] in Maine with several stops along the way.<\/p>\n
My mom, my two sisters, aged 10 and 15 and my cousin Melody who was about the same age as my oldest sister set out in the family station wagon and headed north. I don’t remember much of the trip. I do remember pulling into the campground and playing with my Matchbox cars and watching while everyone else set up the tent (I was only about 5 at the time). The first night of our stay, the weather was threatening but my mother sent us kids down to the bandstand of the campground where there was some kind of show or concert or something going on. At some point, the rain began and the skies opened up with lightning and thunder and buckets of rain. The four of us started running back to our campsite – my oldest sister practically dragging me along as I frantically trying to keep up. I’m sure she would have picked me up in her arms to make the trip faster if I hadn’t been such a fat little kid.<\/p>\n
As I watched my children running after one another, dragging their toy lawnmowers behind them and screaming with joy with the slowly darkening sky overhead, their shrieks melded with the ones ringing in my head as my memory played out. I was a timid child and probably moreso after my father’s untimely and sudden death a few short months before. There wasn’t much that scared me more at the age of five than lightning and the crashes of thunder that followed during a strong summer storm. I was undoubtedly out of my mind with fear as we ran back along the dark, wet paths to our campsite. My memories are jumbled – a snapshot of my sister’s face looking back at me frozen by a flash of lightning, feeling lost and confused about where to go…. When we finally reached our destination, we piled into the station wagon where my mom was waiting. I don’t remember if she was getting ready to drive down to pick us up or if she was just waiting out the thunderstorm. In any case, I can imagine that I clung to her as we watched the rain drops slide down the windows of the car and the lightning became less and less frequent and the thunder quieter as the storm moved away.<\/p>\n
That’s the memory that sticks with me most strongly from that time in my life. Sure, I remember some other things about the trip -the girl who drowned at the lake a day or two later and stopping at [url=http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Fort_Knox_(Maine)]Fort Knox[\/url] to “explore” the historic site, but none comes back to me so clearly or as often as that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While sitting on my hammock this evening watching Chloe and Gabriel chase each other around our lightly leaf-strewn back yard, an often-revisited memory dragged itself back to the surface of my consciousness. In the months following my father’s death, my … Continue reading