When I was three years old and my father was building our house nothing there yet but a skeleton of studs and empty air, I climbed the ladder to the not yet attic and crawled along a joist just wide enough for infant knees until I was discovered in the centre of a would be home with mortality singing along my skin and a cold concrete basement below. All I had going for me (as usual) was blind optimism and a sense of balance like a bright idea not quite yet lost. Then, somehow, before the darkness found me out, my father was aloft, too scared to shout my name or make me move. I think he almost tripped in fear, a man whose feet could dance through work, while I just smiled, expecting praise and found, instead, a painful price of angry hands that spanked me back into a world of safe and love before the time of further years of higher climbs to narrow beams with legs less sure at every step and darker depths below us all.
Posted on: Sat, 08 Jun 2013 18:06:03 +0000
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