Email Poem

Your IP Address: 216.73.216.110

Your Email Address:

To Email Address:

Subject

Personal Note:

Poem Title:

Poem

Mrs. Peligio was a swearing machine  We would run and throw 
ourselves in the crawl space under the shed pretending to look for a
softball when we saw her and this included our mother.
Our neighborhood was small. Normal families with a dad, 
and one-woman-one-non-playing-child family, which was 
strange for a small town in  Middle-Earth United States  in the 60’s.  

Our front porch had the tallest railing in the world around it.  I
was always on that dare-devil railing, doing plays for the other kids.
My sister refused to be a boy, so I had to play Peter Pan
and Captain Hook, jumping up and down off that high railing, over 
and over to change my outfit. We had to pretend to see the other one.

Once upon a time, I dragged my three children to the old neighborhood.
Mrs. Peligio, wandered by to see what we were about. She did not remember me. Not surprising as we had lived there from birth to high school graduation.

One of my children pointed to something and yelled,  “That’s the railing!”
My three grown darlings were in heavy laughter now, laughing so hard they 
were clutching their sides and sobbing. The higher-than-the-tallest-cathedral
porch railing I had told them about for forty years had completely replaced herself. A sneaky carpenter had taken off the sky-scraping railing and replaced it because it was no higher than a four-year-old child.  Memories, nothing like them.

Written 11-30-2018   Contest:  My Youth   Sponsor: Craig Cornish

CAPTCHA Preview

Type the characters you see in the picture

Required