Echoes of the past

I am in a familiar place. Wait a minute! It is the garden of my childhood home. The whole thing feels strange after all the labor we did here. The neverending grass-cutting, the hot afternoons of flipping grass, and pinching memories of hay stacking. The moment my parents sold it, it became my nemesis.

Now, I am hiding in the overgrown grass and expecting disaster. But wait! Who am I hiding from? Is it my cousin sneaking from the other side and playing one of his pranks?

I look to the left. The barn we used to fill with the haystacks is still there. Once again, I feel like a preschool kid killing time by jumping into a haystack from the feared bridge — the bridge connecting the road to the upper part of our barn. The rotting wooden planks nailed to the two woods, which supposed to be beams. It is a pathway where every step feels like a gamble.

A military plane flies over me. It is so low. I instinctively lay in the grass. It feels like a World War II story Grandma used to tell me. What is happening?

I hear a massive explosion in the distance. Is this it? The moment I am supposed to die? I take a breath and look at the sky. I am alive. Black smoke is rising to the sky. It seems they hit a place we used to call a potato storage.

Who on Earth would bomb a building full of potatoes? This is weird! I get the courage to crawl out of the grass to the adjacent field. Only tractor tire prints separate me from the cornfield — a possible escape route.

The metal sound drowns out the suspicious ambient noise of nature. I look around. My childhood home is no longer there. It makes sense the buyers destroyed it to build a new one.

Hold on! Why is the barn still there?

Shit! Why is my aunt holding a rocket launcher and aiming at me?

Sure, I used to fire BB gun at her son. I admit, I wanted to hunt him down with an air gun, but I was only eight years old!

I run and hide behind the closest cherry tree, expecting a hit. I sweat and breathe heavily. I open my eyes and see black. Am I dead? I pinch myself to confirm. It was a hell of a dream.