northeastern Brasil, 1945-1954, part four
part four
we're about to wrap this up. I think a part 5 lurks, but it happens at another house. part four wraps up the blue-grey house. remember the caveats: 1945-1954 were once upon a time, and these memories come from a child roughly from two-and-a-half years old to about twelve years old. in particular, the blue-grey house events happen for a child from roughly ten years old to roughly twelve years old. and there we were, six people kind of estranged from each other, in a new house, a big house, in a new-to-them neighborhood. my father still traveled, or we assumed he did. in any case he was gone for long stretches, then he'd come home for a few days and try to reorder everything that was working just fine, and then he was gone again, and we went back to doing things as if my mother was boss. my mother was busy running the house, and occasionally entertaining people who spoke a language foreign to her, whom she was supposed to impress so they'd want to be more American and more Southern Baptist. meanwhile we kids ran free to a certain extent. ran free. what a strange expression! and yet to some extent we did. we did not know the conventions of a nice neighborhood like we lived in, so we didn't know to stay home and play in our own yard. we lived next to an empty space, that is, a space that was plenty wide enough for another house, maybe two, and actually maybe four since since it was long enough to run from the back of our back yard to the back of the back yards of the houses across the street from ours. in other words, it was huge for kids. no one else played in it, so we did. not together, you understand. well I guess my brothers played together. they were five and sixish years younger than me, and we didn't speak the same language or inhabit the same world. my sister, younger than me and older than they, tried to bridge the gap, which meant she ran back and forth a lot, not really part of either playing. I explored. there was enough rubble there to convince me something had happened - I had read stories of King Uther trying to build his castle over a dragon's lair, so every night whatever had been built during the day got knocked down. whoa! might a dragon live next door to us? but try as I might, I couldn't find the secret entrance that would let out the dragon then let him back in, and we never felt any earthquakes, so probably no dragon. one day in my exploring I discovered the remains of a wall, an outside wall, that would have enclosed most of that space. the wall had been about three brick-widths thick. a castle! but no, there were no ruins of the keep. and from the King Arthur stories, a keep prob'ly would have been bigger than that whole space. hmpf. what, then? and I knew! well, I didn't know, but I knew as well as I could without really knowing. a warehouse! just like on the other side of the river! wait! have I not mentioned the river? oh my goodness, the river! just past that huge playground we appropriated, an enormous river flowed. we were in a drought, and that river still flowed. wide enough that we could just make out the warehouses across the river, and the men running around over and beside the warehouses looked like ants. at least to me. wide enough, deep enough that small ocean-going ships could travel upriver and downriver and pass each other with plenty of room to spare. it wasn't the Mississippi, but it was a big river. I tried and tried and tried to build a raft that I could ride down the river on, but the spare wood I found was too small. the rafts I built were not much larger than me, and capsized while I tried to get on them. prob'ly just as well. I don't remember small boats on that river. tugboats pushing or pulling a string of barges, yes, but no canoes or dinghies. apparently men were too smart for that. or didn't believe enough in magic.
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