My friends, I’ve discovered another wonderful opportunity to write. This is given to the fans of Indigo Spider whose link is posted below. Indigo Spider provides her readers with a choice of photos to use as muse for the next story. I’ve chosen the 2nd prompted visual. Oh, very important rule. 500 word limit.
http://indigospider.wordpress.com/2011/05/29/sunday-picture-press-iv/
There she is. Aunt Loretta. The one woman in the Greene family who is able to cause any kid she looks down at to pee his pants. I experienced this same withering gaze from her in the summer of ’60. I was 5 years old.
Aunt Loretta’s thumb was universally acknowledged as the greenest in town. Her flower garden bloomed at the edge of her seemingly palatial lawn alongside the crumbling and frost heaved public sidewalk of Aztec Street in Hometown, Iowa USA. The immaculate white picket fencing discreetly kept the admirers from her garden. It also lent to the beholding eye the air of hominess and oven baked bread. That’s just how I heard a neighbor’s mom describe the property. I knew what she was talking about because my Grandma could bake the best potato bread. Now, 45 years later I have sensory flashbacks to Grandma’s kitchen with the fresh baked aromas of yeast wafting into the crooks and crannies of my brain: flowing around the crevices of gray matter like butter did as it melted into the warm yeasty body of the Hot Cross Buns and fluffy breads from Grandma’s kitchen.
One Saturday afternoon, after the girls I was playing with in the neighborhood had drifted away, I wandered into the garden of my Aunt Loretta. I was allowed there. She never tried to keep me from admiring her Peonies, Chrysanthemum, Asters, Echinacea, Primrose, Verbena and Black Eyed Susan. Yes, the proper English Garden is what my Aunt Loretta had striven for. I was strolling through the small avenues of Auntie’s garden and I can remember looking UP to see many of the flower heads! Today, I know I felt like “ALICE”. The garden was bright with colors, alive with honey bees and buzzing insects that came to nibble or pollinate the greens of the garden. The feelings I experienced were extraordinary. I felt I were a princess who idled among her gardens. I imagined myself in stiff crinolines and hooped skirts strolling along the garden paths with a woven basket to capture the clipped flowers I’d chosen to fill the vase in the entryway of our home.
A large veined hand roughly grabbed my right shoulder. “Oh lord, Aunt Loretta.” I was spun neatly (if not smartly) around to face the woman. She sputtered and flurried, I was so scared I couldn’t hear what she was carrying on about. The only noise I could make out was the sound of an ocean crashing in my ears. We lived in Iowa. There was no ocean, but I sure could hear it. I could see her face redden in her vehemence. I was dragged to the veranda of the little cottage she shared with Uncle Harry. They stared down at me and I felt the warm wetness dribble down my legs into my shoes. I looked down to see the forgotten flowers I had plucked. My wool socks itched. I had just endured “THE LOOK” and lost.
VERBOSE SHE IS, VERBOSE SHE WRITES 