Orphan's Creed Faded Pictures from My Backyard

The Children's Yard "It's no use talking about it," Alice said, looking up at the house and pretending it was arguing with her. "I'm not going in again yet. I know I should have to get through the Looking-glass againback into the old roomand there'd be an end of all my adventures." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, 1872* Even when I was young, I knew there were two things my mother hated. She hated leaving her five children and she hated when the big brown cardboard boxes had to be packed upsignaling a move from one home to another. They were homes to my mother, not houses. On the day we headed toward our new home on Academy Road in July 1968 where my father worked with children who, as my mother explained to me, needed to feel better before they went home againjust like little birds whose wings needed to heal over time, or perhaps even find new parents to be loved bymy mother cried the entire ride. Her tears steadily dripped onto the bald head of my baby sister Sarah, whom she clutched in her lap. Right before my mother got into the car, she stood outside our garage, the sun beating down on her curly red hair, and looked over the roof toward my father with her piercing blue eyes, shaking her head, and with a voice choking back tears, she said, John, I can't help it. You know how much I hate change. Car rides became so stultifyingly quiet and places became so far away when my mother cried in the front seat. Unlike my mother, I wasn't sad about the move because our old housewhich was really a rather beautiful barn-red housewas just too similar to the first house we had lived in. Both had made me feel spooky inside. I was happy about our move, and my breaths no longer had a nervous twitch behind them. I felt as lucky as a helium-filled balloon that had finally popped and could let all its tense contents out. I think balloons stayed intact just to make kids like me smile, but they would have really preferred to pop and let out their long deep breath, too. I did feel sad, however, that my best friends, Cammy and Brad, had to move away from their home because we were now moving into their house. I would now be sleeping in Cammy's bedroom. My father had a new and better job at the place where all the children played, as I saw it, and now we had to live there because my mother said it was a big job and my father was going to earn almost ten thousand dollars a year. Sometimes you move to new houses in order to become rich. Cammy and Brad's dad, Mr. Cordes, had taken a different job working with children in St. Louis, which was very far away. When I had asked my mother, a couple of weeks before our move, where Cammy and Brad were going, she walked right over to the large map she had tacked up on the wall in our playroom because my older brother, Jimmy (and that was only one year and one month to the day, so he really wasn't older like Wally on Leave It to Beaver), and I were trying to learn the names of states. She put her finger on the red dot that stood for our house, then she slowly moved her finger through state after state until it reached the halfway mark on the map in between our dot and the long, thin state, California. Just to get an idea of how far away that was I asked, Where's Cape Cod again? Cape Cod was as far away as I had ever been. But at the end of a long car ride, which would begin even before the sun came up and in which Jimmy and I slept the entire way in our pajamas, when we woke up hours later, there it would bethe magical sight of little green waves tipped with foam that looked like Mr. Bubble washing onto the off-white sand. Cape Cod was the yellow dot on the map,Carswell, Sue is the author of 'Orphan's Creed Faded Pictures from My Backyard', published 2005 under ISBN 9780345438560 and ISBN 0345438566.