SUN SHORTS:...Stories To Be Told...Some Kind Of Love...

 

By EDUARDO PAZ-MARTINEZ

RIO GRANDE CITY, Texas |...For a small place, well, the neighbors said it was a world-full of love, romance that had turned to family and then to history. No one had written it yet, but the word was that the essence of humanity had walked into the old frame house and everywhere inside it, especially when the kids had been kids and in school.

Few of the neighbors knew the family well, and it was the rural postman who served as bearer of news & info from the address at the high-end of the dirt road.

Some said the faithful husband worked far from home, that he only came to see his family on occasional weekends. And they noted somewhat sadly that the loyal wife, a plain-looking woman with broad shoulders and stout legs, did most of the repair work on the property.

Someone told someone who told someone else that he'd seen her busily chopping down a tree and stacking chunks of the trunk, as if for firewood.

The kids played up and down the unpaved road, sometimes with a ball and at others with each other. Playing tag, that stuff that used to be an art, one lost to the kids being raised in the city.

When the postman one day went around saying the family had left the house, no one did more than momentarily raise an eyebrow. What do you say about neighbors you do not know? Nothing, of course. Like the old house that would remain abandoned and ultimately decay, the family that had lived in it was just a fading memory.

But there had to be love there, even if it was the barest of love, for it's a known fact that a house that becomes a home needs that, seeks it and, even for a few moments in universal time, gets it...

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