I open my grandmother’s trunk and the smell of cedar recalls my father’s woolen army blankets, faded and frayed. The inside of the chest had become their home, a refuge from the memories woven into fibers that had crossed the ocean twice.
My father would not talk about the war itself, but he brought home with him both blankets and cots. We never used the blankets.
On hot summer nights my brothers and I opened the cots to sleep in the basement, unaware of the secrets they could tell us, the images seared into our father’s eyes and carried in his bones.
all those silences–
invisible ink written
on the wings of birds
Day 28 NaPoWriMo–the prompt is to describe a significant space from your life.
K. 
So poignant. Those silences carried through time and space.
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They do. I hadn’t thought about those cots in a long time. As a child, I had no idea.
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It’s funny what we remember, and how objects carry those memories.
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Haunting, K. All this is are messages if we can only see them. I feel bad for your dad having to see combat. My dad was in WWII and only talked about it once and it was a happy memory. He wanted to spare us, I think.
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Yes, our fathers kept things to themselves.
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this is = things
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these keyboards have their own minds…
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🙂
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Ohh. What a strong impression. We will never know.
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No. That generation kept things to themselves.
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Love this haibun–very moving. The haiku at the end is incredible.
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Thanks.
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“on the wings of birds” There is so much held in silence.
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There is. Particularly for our fathers’ generation I think.
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This is very vivid, Kerfe. Is it based on truth?
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Yes. The prompt asked us to think about our childhood bedroom, which made me thinking about sleeping on the cots in the basement. Then I began thinking about where the cots came from.
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Yup. Men and war. Who on earth conceives such madness? Damage cuts so deep it can never be undone. Bleeding right through generations. 🙁
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It seems to have no end.
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