Sort of a Gray Day, I Hate Rain on top of Snow

Corners in the Tiny House are so dark. So I turn on my plant grow lights. We all have SAD. I can see the rain splatter the deck and remember---

The blue jay and cardinal cavorting in the wet grass a moment earlier, the colors decorating the brown grass, and remember---

This too shall pass.

My brother Steve sent, in a series of emails, Google pics of the houses our family lived in (not including the serial moves my parents made when fully retired). He used each image to riff on flash memories, really just skimming the surface, of what he recalled most about each place. He should commit to doing a writing study, micro series, of flash memoir using the images as prompts.

I used the “the Kettering house on Hackney” to get an overhead view and found the name of the creek I fell into, that my mother had to come pull me out of. It looks like a cement ravine with a trickle of water running through it. Little Beaver Creek.

Steve also sent an image of the Wick’s house, former neighbors from Hackney, who stayed friends with the family after we all moved into bigger houses. Steve said in a matter of words that going over there was a refuge. Same—I loved visiting them, first as a tag-along kid and then on my own. I remember asking Bill Wick Sr. if I could park my bike on his garage when I went to the Holiday at Home parade. At that point it was just him at the house as Esther his wife had passed many years before of lung cancer and all the kids were gone, moved out of the house. Through the art and archive of Google Steve caught a glimpse of a man in a lawn chair sitting in the garage which he believes is Bill.

Is Bill still alive? Interesting how we can retrieve memory, “find” loved ones using Google maps. And . . .

A bit sad on this rainy day, seeing old Bill in his garage.