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84 Kinderszenen William Reichard One There is never enough money. There is never enough to eat. When there is enough to eat, there is never enough of our mother because someone has to work. My father rarely works. My father works at being crazy. Being crazy is a lot of work. Being crazy requires a great deal of money. There is never enough money. There is never enough to eat. Two I collect seeds in a jar. This is the year of the near foreclosure, the year of the second fake heart attack. My father grabs at his chest and rolls around on the floor. My sisters scream. I don’t know about it, being with my brother down the street when it happens. The ambulance comes, sirens screaming. We wonder who died, then continue to play. My father convalesces. Being crazy is a lot of work; it takes practice to make your heart race. My father is fired from his job. My mother takes a job at a factory. The factory prints magazines and catalogs. My mother works the night shift. My father doesn’t work at all. During the day, my mother does housework. At night, she makes catalogs and magazines. She never earns enough money. We never see her. Three We lose a piano. We lose some guns. We lose our minibikes. We lose our car. Things in this universe never vanish, but change, change form, change hands. Other hands now hold our things and we are going hungry. The bank asks for the house back. My mother panics. My father naps. Thinking we’ll have to leave our house, I walk around the yard and collect seeds from each plant there. I put them in jars. I think I can plant them in whatever new house we move to. Someone else’s house, maybe. A house stolen from other hands. When it becomes clear that (Scenes from childhood, after Robert Schumann) 85 we will not move, I take the jar of seeds and stow it in the crawl space under my bedroom floor. I leave it there. Years later, my mother moves to a smaller house. I forget the seeds. Four Our family cat is my best friend. I play with hollyhocks, hide in tall grass in the big ditch along the highway. One day, two cars crash. Blood and glass everywhere. People flood the road. Police swarm. Onlookers trample our garden to get a better view. Through a shattered windshield, a man’s face, trapped inside the car. His skull has taken a new shape. Sirens slice the summer air. Welders cut the cars apart but it’s too slow a process. The face collapses. From my vantage point in the strawberry patch, I watch the man die. Five Steady breath. Steady breath. Steady breath. Pedaling up the hill near Rathaie’s pasture. Pedaling past the cows. Crows perched on phone lines. The sun unbearable. My skin brown and burning. Steady breath. The scent of freshly cut alfalfa makes my mouth water. Remember the taste of honeysuckle juice, the taste of raw sweet corn stolen from neighboring fields. August’s heat. The swamp drawn down by drought; the turtles resting in the sun; the dogs that chase from the lonely driveways of small farms. Steady breath. Pedaling. Getting somewhere. Six Another one gone. A ceremony in a small town, in a courthouse. A rare dress, my mother in tears and nice lady shoes. A cake. A keg. A drunken husband. A room now empty. A sister married. Another one gone. Seven Constant chatter from the canary my mother keeps because her mother always kept one. My grandmother’s birds lived. My mother’s die, one by one, small yellow corpses and a trip to the backyard where my best friend the cat lies buried. Add a canary. Plant a tree. My mother tries to live as she was taught. The cannas brought from Nebraska, from her mother’s garden, grow bold and scatter around the garden in no particular order. Constant chatter from the canary as my father smokes William Reichard 86 Ecotone: reimagining place in the dining room, the room where the bird’s...

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