By J. Lawrence Nazareth. My earliest recollection is that of being seated on a hardwood floor and peering down into a darkened hole in a floor-board when I was little more than a year old. It is more a presence, or should I say a pre-sense, a memory of something that may not have happened. For me, however, it is real, my sole link to the “wood-and-iron” house of my birth --- “wood” because that was the material of its construction and “iron” because its roof was made from corrugated sheets of that metal. Shortly before my second birthday, my parents were fortunate enough to be able to move to a small stone bungalow about half a mile down the road, away from this wood-and-iron house in which they had lived in the first years of their marriage along with my father’s unmarried sister, the widow of my father’s eldest brother and her children and, at one time or another, two other brothers, one of them newly married. Houses were scarce in the years immediately following World War II. The wood-and-iron house has long since disappeared though I remember walking past a similar structure as a child with my younger sister and brother on our way to church.
Read full text here: https://selma-carvalho.squarespace.com/nonfiction-1/2018/4/7/young-under-the-apple-boughs Best wishes, Editor, Joao Roque Literary Journal
