A FAMILIAR PLACE by DeAnn Daigle

This place terrifies me! It’s a place inside that fights back all the moments of not being seen, of not being supported or given any sort of appreciation – or maybe it was not enough; maybe this place inside forgot that it was appreciated and it was recognized – but sparsely so and only on occasion — not on a consistent and needed basis.

I guess I left home when I was ten years old. That was the summer I’d come to New York City for the very first time and when my aunt and uncle brought me back to Soldier Pond I cried when I saw my parents. I did not want to come back to them. When my aunt, who was my mother’s sister, and her husband were leaving to return to New York, I wanted to go back with them.

Both parents were surprised I guess; perhaps even shocked that I would feel that way. My mother wept. I guess they did not realize how invisible I felt with them.

How could they know that I’d had the time of my life in New York, not because of the museums and plays and the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, but because my aunt and uncle, who had no children of their own, had played with me, had teased me, had included me in every conversation.

And I’d begun to feel like a somebody – like I was real and visible with likes and dislikes and thoughts of my own. And I could laugh and not worry once about being forgotten.

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AUTHOR BIO:

DeAnn Daigle was born and grew up in a small village in the very north of Maine on the border of Canada. Here she first discovered the beauty of nature, of music and poetry. Her seeking led her to enter religious life for eighteen years, and then led her to leave it. She lives now in the East Village of Manhattan and works on the twenty-ninth floor of a mid-Manhattan skyscraper where she keeps alive her dreams of writing, of singing, of beauty.