Introduction…
They say in the end your life flashes before your eyes. Who knows if that’s true, but I do know that as we get older, there starts a welling up of those early days—childhood, teen years. These memories are often drawn from a smell or a feeling; the muggy dampness of a summer evening, walking along a trail of pines in winter, an old shed with the smell of gasoline, dusty attic steps, or the scent of cinnamon on shortcake.

Maybe these memories swell up later in life because our father, or brother, or whoever was with us then, is no longer there. We think of them and it carries us back, back to the beginning. Those early memories are like old movies now. Isn’t that odd; how conditioned we are by our media life that we see things like old Instant movies.

But not all memories seem far away. Some stand out with a vibrancy and detail that make it like yesterday, right down to the sounds of crickets; the sweaty heat on our young skin, the hungry anticipation of a summer picnic. Huge life events don’t stand out as much as these small ones.

It’s the day in the life—simple moments, glimpses into a state of mind, being young, having a father, grandparents, friends now lost. These glimpses, with all their emotions, textures, and sensualities, remind me that reincarnation might exist. We’re just spirits seeking and feeding off these sensations, and we carry them forward, over and over.

I lost my brother on Thanksgiving when I was sixty-two. We were different people in so many ways, but similar in our bond of mutual experiences We had that sacred fate of being on this great journey together. In the years before he died, I found myself wanting to spend more time with him, but there were barriers set in place by the times—politics, or simply the burden of comparison that forges a subtle wedge between siblings.

Both my brother and I struggled financially at times throughout our lives. These were the times when we were the closest. Since I went to college and had a family, I felt my brother’s joy in being the hero, saving the day with his knowledge of tools and gardens. This need of his to give unconditionally is what defined him as a hero in the end. He had his peculiarities, but he rose above. He kept his dragons contained. Not many people can pull that off, not in the loud society that’s encircled us today.

Now there’s just me and my mother—the last of my inner circle who sat at the dinner table in the early days. The talk and gossip that swirled around our Sunday Dinner table became the projector for my memories, especially concerning the little farmhouse cabin in Kaiser Hollow, and the house in town on Cherry Street. My brother’s life, my father’s life, and my mother’s are all centered there in that small Pennsylvania town; living, yet frozen in time. I realize my memories are now solely entwined with my mother’s, going back to the beginning, carried through from the 1940s on up to that last Thanksgiving dinner that didn’t happen

~ Sometime around 1920 ~
Elsie stood on her grandmother’s front porch all sweaty and dusty in her scuffed, black lace-ups. Her shoes weren’t much good walking over the rocky wagon road that cut through George’s lower fields. It was eight in the morning and already
hazy summer hot—salty, eye-stinging sweat around your eyes hot, and the hollow hadn’t seen rain in well towards a month.

Elsie loved going to see how Grandma Oberfell was coming along with her flowers, which were planted like a masterpiece along the front hill of her cabin. Elsie loved it there. She loved visiting and having warm tea like a grown-up. Grandma made it weak like her mom did, with just a touch of honey. She made it winter and summer, even when they had to fan their faces and
fight gnats away from their damp face and ears.

But Grandma Oberfell’s house never seemed all that hot in summer. It was tucked down along a crick that was not as big as Elsie’s, and nothing like the Loyalsock that came from high up the mountains of Northern Pennsylvania. But there was a high circle of trees around the house and the sunlight was blocked most of the time, except for on the garden, which is where they sat staring up from the front porch..

What’s new down in Kaiser Hollow,” Grandma Oberfell asked Elsie as she sat sipping her tea. Elsie looked up from her teacup, which she held close to her face.
“A man came in off the road yesterday and mother saw him coming…he was walking. You know sometimes mother lets people stay in the barn when they’re walking through. She gives them food right off the dinner table! This was a salesman. He gave Mother a tiny iron like she puts on the stove. A little
one, no bigger than my hand.” Elsie held up her small hand, smiling and knocking her rock-scratched shoes against the porch post.
“Good for him, giving you something new to play with,” Grandma slowly said, nodding her head. “I get men up here from the sawmill from time to time. Though they get plenty of food at the camp, I guess.

You can see the camp house right down over the hill.” Elsie could smell the wood smoke as the camp cook was firing up the stoves to get dinner heated up. There was always such a ruckus in the woods above Grandmother’s house. Men yelling and sometimes laughing a bunch at a time. You could hear the
big trees falling way up on the second ridge of the big mountain “Won’t be long ‘til there isn’t any forest left on this mountain.” Grandma paused for a moment. “More sun for my herb garden, I guess,”
Grandma followed with a big smile and a twinkle in her eye.