northeastern Brasil, 1945-1954, part five
It's probably worthwhile to remind you again of the caveats on this sequence of appreciations: 1945-1954 was once upon a time, and these appreciations come from the experiences of a boy from two-and-a-half years old to about twelve years old. For this part, part five, the appreciation comes from the experiences of a boy between ten and twelve years of age. the blue-grey house, the last house we lived in in Brasil, had a more or less enclosed narrow back yard separated from the main lot by an eight-foot high wall that ran all around it. well, not all around it. there was a gate-sized gap in the wall, near the pineapple plant. how big a gate? well, way bigger than boy-sized. you could probably have led a horse through it, but two big men couldn't have walked through it at the same time. that size. for this boy, that walled away back yard was a spooky place. I explored it of course, but only after peeking in several times. whatever lived back there hid from me every time, which made me brave enough to go in. there was no grass like a lawn, but a stubble might have been the remains of a lawn. weeds had taken over, weeds way taller than me, maybe taller than my father. taken over like they made a sorta jungle. there was a hint of a path, and I used a machete to hack the path into what it should have been, like an explorer would have done. it was cool! I actually used a machete and did something useful to me! the path led me to and past the shed - a rickety structure shaped more or less like a garage that no car could ever get to. which made sense, I suppose, since we had no car. no one in the neighborhood had a car, or any place to put one. cars were not common in 1952, not in northeastern Brasil. but the shed. how rickety was the shed? if a boy pushed on it, the walls swayed. even a ten-year-old boy knew not to climb on that shed. and what was in the walled in yard out past the shed? nothing. the spooky walled-in back yard was kind of a disappointment. it held no captured princess, no wounded dragon, no dying knight, not even a vaqueiro or a bandido leftover from an old movie. the only thing it held of interest besides the weeds was the shed. the shed had two doors. one of them was big and wide, like you might use to back a cart up to, except there was no way to get a cart into that walled-in back yard, and no way to get the cart past the weeds if you did. it was a mystery wrapped in secrecy. but I figured out how to get the little door, the man-sized door open. some book I read described how to get through a locked door, and made it sound easy. it wasn't, but I learned to do it. which got me into the shed. inside, the shed was festooned with cobwebs, so I had to get a stick and sweep them off things. what things? an old table, kind of oval-shaped. I tried to imagine the people who would eat sitting at an oval-shaped table. my parents maybe. my parents and my sister and I. but it wasn't big enough for six of us to sit around. (I had two little brothers.) and the shed had crates, half a dozen or so crates. I very carefully opened one and it was empty. what on earth would anyone store an empty crate for? I shrugged, and guessed my parents had. I opened another. a gazillion books. that at least made sense. I browsed several. hm. no pictures. no stories. one of them was called _Interpreting the Bible_, which made sense, sorta. my father was a missionary, he always spoke from the Bible, and he didn't speak Portuguese very well, not to my ear. so it made sense that he'd have a book called _Interpreting the Bible_, except for two things. why would he keep it in a crate in the shed? and the Bible had already been interpreted. I had a Bible in Portuguese. well, sometimes my father seemed crazy, so maybe it did make sense. I closed that crate back up and opened the next. stuff. boxes of stuff, bags of stuff, carefully wrapped stuff, loose stuff. if I remember right, I opened and closed every damned crate out there, and could not find a thing of interest to a ten-year-old boy! I sat on the empty crate and wondered about grownups. did they ever do anything that made sense? I sat there and looked around the shed. there was not a damned thing magical about it! spooky, yes. magical, no. it was a real disappointment! wait, though. could it be an opportunity instead? I thought it could! maybe the shed could be a place where I performed some magic of sorts. maybe it could!
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