I woke up early that morning
and tossed the light covers back, scrambling quickly to pull back the curtains at
the window. My anxious glance out the window into my back yard, however, brought
tears to my eyes and questions to my mother.
There were elephant ears and poinsettias
growing just outside my bedroom window.. -and a few weeds I'm sure. But this was
where the cat had chosen to have her litter of kittens. How many were there? I don't
remember...four, six, ten... What i do remember was seeing their little heads lying
separate from their twisted bodies, their week old, soft kitten fur matted and damp
with blood and morning dew...their sightless eyes, which had not had time to open,
now forever closed to the warm beauty of a Florida spring. Mama explained that the
daddy cats often killed the young, but I didn't understand for death had a hold on
my heart.
Our little house sat on a small lot barely 50 x 100 feet in size.
It had been purchased by my father as part of the divorce settlement when I was two.
It was just three little rooms in the beginning. I was told that the day we moved
in the grass in the J was as high as my head. Both the living room and the dining
room served as bedrooms for my mother, my brother, my grandmother and I while the
little kitchen doubled up with the cubbyhole of a bathroom tucked in its corner.
Over the years, my father, a carpenter by trade, added three more bedrooms and another
bathroom (Thank God!), a front porch and a back porch.
Just outside the back
porch, in the back yard, was a chicken pen where a feisty little bantam rooster held
sway over his hens and the larger Rhode Island Reds as well. My mother loved fried
chicken. Every Sunday was fried chicken dinner and every Saturday another one of
the little rooster's flock was chosen to provide our Sunday nourishment. Mama would
chase one down, grab it by the neck, swing it around her head a couple of times and
that was all it took. Then came the plucking, singeing off the remaining feathers
with a rolled up burning newspaper, and then gutting and cleaning. My step-father,
when he became a part of our family, preferred to chop their little heads off and
throw their bodies to the ground where they flopped about in a last frenzied imitation
of life. I did not participate. Death had a hold on my heart.
I remember a
time when our dog King, a German shepherd/chow mix, was missing for several days.
That wasn't unusual as he often roamed when the mood struck so we didn't worry too
much. Then one day while I was perched up in the orange tree in the back yard, my
mother and brother set out to find "that awful stink coming from under the house"
and they found King, a gunshot hole in his chest, resting for the last time in his
favorite spot beneath the back porch.
Those orange trees in the back yard
were easy to climb. They were just short little trees with trunks that branched out
very close to the ground. In the spring the sweet fragrance of the orange blossoms
would waft in my bedroom window....and in summer the putrid odor of oranges rotting
on the ground would send me looking for other trees to climb!
I was a fat,
quiet, shy little girl who spent most of her childhood, or so it seems now, hiding
out within the protective branches of one tree or another...the orange trees in our
backyard, the oak trees in the schoolyard, anywhere there was a way up and a branch
strong enough to hold me. I was even pretty good on the monkey bars which now, thinking
back on it, seems pretty strange for a child carrying as much extra weight as I was.
Heck, I couldn't do a pull up or swing from bar to bar now if my life depended on
it.
I can't be certain how many other things died in that back yard. I do
remember a big sea turtle my brother brought home one summer from a trip to Merrit
Island. We ate that too. I had a pet duck one year, but he was Christmas dinner.
My step-father didn't care whose pet it was. If it was potential food, we ate it.
I ate and ate and ate, and hid my body in the trees and my sadness and loneliness
behind a silent facade. Perhaps my innocense died in that back yard as well, as death
became just another part of life.