BEDA Day 16: Place I Lived

When I was born, I lived in a house in New Smithville, near Kutztown. There was something about that house - maybe that there were few people around - that made it somewhat magical. Most of the rooms were typical, except for one. It was my sister’s room, technically, but it never felt like that to me, because I had never seen her inside the room. The walls were purple, and the sun would always shine in from a back window. It gave the room a sort of lavender glow. The thing that always drew me to the room, though, was the colony of lady bugs that lived inside of it. It was a family, a nation of lady bugs. Every week I would go inside of this lady bug room and write down how many bugs I found. I wouldn’t give them names, but I would write down their color and number of spots. Then, I would search around the room for the carcasses of other lady bugs. Most of the time, there were more dead bugs in the room than ones that were alive. I was strangely never bothered by this. On occasion, I would find a particular lady bug that I would name, and then take it from the room. My grandmother had given me a hand painted “bug house” when I was very young, and I would put these rescued bugs inside of it. Now that I think about it, they would always seem very scared when they were put inside. They could probably smell death. I didn’t understand that you needed to give the bugs food - I didn’t know what they ate, either. The bug house became more of an unintentional torture device. After a while, I stopped using the bug house, but the bugs kept returning to that purple room.

Sometimes, I looked out of the window in that room, to the forest behind my house. I had never seen the inside of the forest, but my imagination made it better than it ever possibly could be. In my mind, there was a waterfall to the left of the edge of it, which was impossible, but I was convinced. I would have dreams about this waterfall. In my imagination, a train would drive through the waterfall several times a day. It was black and maroon, actually very similar to the train to Hogwarts. But I couldn’t possibly have imagined it as that, because I hadn’t even read Harry Potter at the time. The existence of this train wasn’t as easy to refute, as we were fairly close to an actual set of train tracks, and late at night, I could hear the trains, hoping that one of them was my train. I grew up with these lady bugs, waterfalls, and trains. They were my only companions, really. It was a small neighborhood, all with kids much older than me. I was very emotional the day that we moved away. I still have dreams about that house. More like nightmares.