Cloia & LorilynClaude

My parents were old from my earliest memory. My father being 52 when I was born--my mother, 36. Music was the reason they met--my father putting on a radio show in Muncie that my aunt drug my mother to. They met and planned to marry within two weeks time. I am sure there were many regrets in their relationship but I know that my father worshipped my mother, and she respected him. It always felt like he was trying to hold onto her as she was trying to slip away.

There are many blanks in my memories of being young. Most memories come only in snippets. Disorganized. The only times that I can remember in sequence involve the woods. The animals. The places I would go. To say I was ignored as a child, would be a mistake--but I had freedom to be 'as I was' that went uncontested until my childhood home burned and we moved to Texas. There was trauma, of course, in my childhood. Everyone has stories they hide. For me, it was shouting voices that I could not get to stop. The fighting never seemed to end in my family's house. At one time I managed to silence them, only to have a Dr. in Bedford discover my secret of using stuffing from the back of a worn out couch to deafen myself to the voices. As for the relationship with my siblings, they were older than I..the attention I received from them was mainly to be used as a pawn against one another, so it was easier to stay in the woods and avoid being used.

The woods were a sanctuary to me. A home free of voices, at least the kind you hear. The woods themselves have sounds and movements that you become familiar to when you have been there enough to feel you belong. You know the sound of a bird dropping a twig from a tree branch, and smile at the chattering of a squirrel who races down the tree to see what it was that fell. When you return day after day and harm nothing, moving only your eyes and ears to catch the movements of things that feel like they are part of you-there is a wonderful feeling of acceptance in a world that is more than happy to have you there.