If You Miss the Train I’m On
By Lenee Cobb
You will know that I am gone; you can hear the whistle blow 500 miles.
I sit outside on the patio at my parent’s condominium in Lakewood in the wee hours of the morning crying. It is raining softly. Daddy is now 84. Mom is a few years younger. Daddy had a stroke last month and mom had one last week. It is summertime and their window is open above the patio. I can hear them snoring comfortably through it. After all the years of rambling around the country, my parents finally planted a garden. The only reason this garden is here is that they are old now, too old to follow places their youth allowed them to go. They both hate not being able to pick up and just go—anywhere.
The garage wall serves as the patios back wall. There is a dim light sending mere whispers . . .
Once Upon a Dark and Storybook Night
By Leneé Cobb
(Excerpt from Moonwalks and Unknowns)
Around 1960/’61. I’m four. The Air Force transferred Daddy from Andrews Air Force Base in South Carolina to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska. We drove north through the U.S. and then across Canada to get there. Somewhere within the vast Canadian countryside, this happened:
I don’t know how many days we’d been driving nor where all we’d stayed but I do remember traveling across a far expanse of flat country. Sometimes there were woods, sometimes not, just rolling hills and flatland. This particular day had been foggy and as twilight descended, the fog thickened. Yet up the road to our right, a faint light shone through it. Dad slowed the car so he and mom could read the sign.
Mom said, “Jerry, it’s a pool!”
The Haunted Trailers
3/12/15 By Lenee Cobb
This is an excerpt from Moonwalks and Unknowns featuring The Trespassers
1962 (I think.)
Unbeknownst to me, my mom was pregnant with my first brother, Gerald. He was born in February, but he was the first baby born that year and because of that, he was the New Year Baby. My folks won some free gasoline for his birth. It was snowing the night he was born.
I was at the hospital in the lobby where there was a TV and a couch and some chairs. Alice and Wonderland was on and it was in color. That was the first time I’d watched color TV.
A few months before my brother was born, my parents did something they’d never done before, they purchased a turquoise house in a brand new government housing development as high as one could live in the Chugach Mountains above Eagle River. For the first time I could remember, we lived off base.
Memory Full
By Leneé Cobb
One must be sure to get inside the carved grooves of this wooden box when dusting. Inside all the ornately carved flowers that decorate the lid, there used to be a picture of an English cottage in the summertime that invited you to visit, if only through a daydream. This is the only thing I have left that belonged to my Grandma and Grandpa Williams. I open it.
Thunder Rush
By Leneé Cobb
An excerpt from Moonwalks and Unknowns
All names have been changed to protect the guilty, as usual.
A young woman in cutoffs stands a few feet away from me, waving her wand in circles through the air. I sit on a log along the Lyre River, watching sunlight glint upon the bubbles floating above the blond head of my two-year-old daughter as she and her dad frolic, spla
shing in the icy shallows. The heat, bubbles, and sparkling water take me back to another time, a time when marriage and children were not yet imagined, and life, like now, was to be savored as the very, very best of days.
Cloudless and sultry might mean laid back and bored so some but not to my red-haired, freckle-faced, chipped tooth, button-nosed best friend Bonnie, because I was here. We got up early for an adventure.
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