“You’re doing a great job Grace, push!” my mother called.
“Ahhhhhhh!” Grace screamed, “fuf fuf fuf!” she breathed.
“PUSH!” mother yelped as the baby’s head erupted from Grace’s body.
Nick’s eyes grew big, his face pale. He became woozy, and plopped on the floor unconscious.
“Nick!” Grace screamed.
“Forget about him he is fine!” mother barked.
My father came to the rescue nonchalantly handing my mother the towel as she grabbed the baby. He then handed her a blue bulb from his pocket. Stunned my mother looked up at him she had forgotten about the air ways. She took the bulb from him and inserted it into the baby’s nose and throat. My mother clamped the umbilical cord and clipped it.
She handed the baby to my father and sewed Grace up. Cleaning and dressing her wounds she took her time, making sure it was right. My father took the baby to the tub of warm water and bathed the baby and put a diaper on it. He handed the baby back to my mother and she wrapped it up in a blanket.
“Grace, it’s a girl.” She said smiling.
Grace looked at my mother and cried happily. My mother began to cry too as my father came over to hug her for a job well done.
“What will you call her?” my father asked.
“Faith” Grace said, “May she always have faith.
Mother and father laughed as Nick slowly came off the floor.
“Is it over?” he asked stupefied.
My father walked over slapped him on the back, and said, “mazal tuv, it’s a girl.”
Mother walked past Nicholas. Together she and father left them to figure it out. Grace showed Faith off to Nick and smiled.
He crawled on his knees to Grace’s side and whispered, “She’s beautiful.” He kissed the baby’s forehead, “I’m your daddy little girl.” Together they stared at faith bewildered and full of fear.
My mother liked to say,”Faith was the first baby of the new world”.
She pretended that everything was gone except the people on our farm in our little patch of land. She pretended there was no suffering anywhere, and no one to worry about other than ourselves.
She said, “Worrying about invisible people was a waste of time, when she had seven real people to fuss over.”
Chapter eleven
Grace died soon after faith’s birth. Like a thief in the night Nick packed some supplies, stole a horse, and disappeared without so much as a whisper. Mother raised Faith as her own. We watched her grow, and played with her and soon other families came through.
We built farms just like ours one right next to the other helping to provide security and food until they could sustain themselves we built a church and a hospital. We built a school and a market where we could trade services and products. Each year more and more children are born. There is even a cemetery now with a few dozen people. The first being Grace.
There is a capital building now where we plan to fill a vacant home with a presumptuous old man as times have before, to govern for men who cannot govern themselves. This man, no doubt a fast talking idiot, will tell everyone his great plan and as great as all plans are none shall ever follow a direct path.
There will always be unforeseen glitches that cannot be controlled. There will always be men with fiery tempers, and wild free wills that like untamed horses run rampant threw politics. Screwing up society as they go along, willing participants unable to look away like a fiery train crash.
In a million years from now the waters will rise and take these men out. A descendant of mine will hold her head strong against the raging winds carrying her children to safety. God willing we will survive when survival is at its lowest. But what I cannot answer is why; why did we survive? Who can really answer?
Is procreation really the only reason for survival? My mother would say family is why we survive, because love is what feeds survival, and we survive
to love. It is the soul we carry that makes us procreate to love; and love to live, to procreate.
I was twenty five years old then, and we became a small town ship. We call ourselves Ville de Bella Township in Northern Virginia just near the border of West Virginia. Located on the Shenandoah River.
It is hard to believe my mother started all of it 19 years before in a tiny metal boat in a horrible storm. This woman who raised me was not the same woman that gave birth to me. She had created this woman that had stood before me. Like so many men before us forging civilizations, weaving myths, and legends bigger than the men themselves. My mother will forever be remembered as the goddess that laid each brick with her tiny fragile hands.
It is time for me to find a space of my own to weave my own stories and find a woman to build a family with. My mother hated the idea of me struggling as she did.
She said,”The struggles of my mother were not intended to be mine, but to make life easier for me to live better.”
I know she meant well but I was eager to leave this place and find adventures of my own. I left and not long after my mother and father died within weeks of each other. I was not there for the funeral but I am told everyone that ever shook their hands was there. They carried them through the town and even constructed a bronze statue of her that sits in the center of town. She wouldn’t have wanted me to sit crying, shed say, it’s a waste of time because she is in heaven with her soul mate.
Table of Contents
Chapter one
Chapter two
Chapter three
Chapter four
Chapter 5
Chapter six
Chapter seven
Chapter eight
Chapter nine
Chapter ten
Chapter eleven
In My Mother's Time Page 4