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When I was a child, there was not a cloud in the sky...

I remember all the vacations and my parents; my only problem was my sweaty back sticking to the folding chair on the beach. I seem to have spent my eternity dreaming, absorbing the beach, and dreaming of roaming through far and unexplored lands.

I remember how I learned, impromptu and extremely premature, to ride the bike with no hands and feet-the bottom of the hill where I landed and the ride in the ambulance.

The pleasure I had joshing my grandmother who always enchanted us with her culinary experiments, outwardly offensive, but once you closed your eyes everything tasted fine.

Fighting with my dad and our afterwords bruised egos, finalizing outlandish plans under a sturdy and peculiar stream of consciousness ... my connection with books that kept me in the same place for hours.

Where are these days? Time is possibly an elastic band snapping back and forth.

Now I stare at my childhood house and it seems so small ... I wonder where the giant apple tree is. We always used the bad apples as weapons.

Where are the old times?

I want to find the cryogenic master and ask for the keys to unlock the time he froze...

The attic in my grandmother’s house

The narrow staircase ascending to the attic fascinated me throughout my entire childhood.  At the end of the stairs, there was a low door and the mere thought of what might be hidden behind it fed my imagination with mystery, fantasy, or spooky feelings.

After grandmother died, the house was empty for a while. It later sold at a ridiculously low price, making it easy for me to redeem it at an even sillier low price.

The cottage is hidden among the dunes, overseeing the sea.  The harsh weather , time and strong winds added to its wrinkles, just like an old sailor creased face.

At night, in the dark, by the window,I now often sit and watch the restless silver shuffle of the waves in the moonlight. I listen lost in thoughts and memories to the wind’s soft swing as the house creeks and aches .

The staircase leading to the little door to the attic still has the same spell over me as it did during my childhood.Today however, I decided to open the mysterious door, so, armed with a flashlight, I started climbing the old wooden ladder.  The narrow steps squeaked under my steps and my fingers touched timidly the key in the pocket of my skirt. When I reached the top of the stairs, I slipped the key in the old lock. The noise traveled through the whole house. I pushed the door with my foot and walked in gliding through the many threads of spider webs.

The attic seemed large, stretching over the entire top of the house.  The wood beams blackened by the passage of time made it look like a church tower.  At the end of it, I saw a round and dirty window through which light seemed to ineffectually attempt to take a curious look inside the dusty room. The entire space was full of old trunks, cabinets, an oval mirror about the height of a man, dusty and incomprehensible yellow magazines,a baby stroller with large wheels, and a gramophone with a disc under its twisted arm.  I churned its handle several times and the disc began to rotate.  From its blackfunnel, a somber voice broke the eerie silence - words I recognized : EdithPiaf, La Mer.

I lifted the bottom of my skirt dragging on the floor and tried to push a box towards the round window in the corner.  Without noticing, I tipped over a picture standing behind the trunk I was pushing. All my attention shifted now towards the fine portrait of a woman drawn in pencil.

 I was amazed ! The woman in the drawing, looking happy and full of anticipation, hereyes gazing somewhere in the distance, looked very much like me!  Underneath the obvious features however,there was a melancholic beauty. The eyes, the eyes looked filled with a certain knowledge of the ways of the world and maybe the life about to swallow her.

I looked feverishly in many of the wooden trunks in the hope of finding out more about the young woman in the drawing.

When I walked in front of the oval mirror,and I thought I saw a shadow silhouette similar to that in the painting.  It only took a couple of seconds before the woman lost its outlines and disappeared forever in the dusty light of the loft.

The room returned quick to its eerie cob webs invaded existence.

I looked down from the small round window at the wet sand below and I heard the waves breaking close by in what seemed like a whisper calling a name I could not understand....