A Forest Fire, Vividly Remembered

This picture is from a book of childhood memories I've been working on for a while. The memories are emotionally vivid, but not not clearly visualized. There are pictures, accompanied by anecdotes. I keep working at the pictures until they seem to capture the atmosphere and feeling I want to express. Since I'm not an artist, none of the drawings are realistic. This picture, for example, represents a moment when I climbed to the roof of my house with my brother and sister. Darkness covered everything, except the glow from a distant forest fire. The house, and we, would not have been visible to an onlooker.

In the picture, I'm the child sitting in the middle. My courage did not match that of my siblings, but the exercise was exhilarating. We climbed out of a small window, visible beneath us in the picture, onto a flat, tar-covered, roof. This roof looks slanted in the picture, but was not. We had secure footing on this lower roof.

From the tar roof, we hoisted ourselves onto the main roof, which was sharply angled. The surface was tin, smooth and slick, except for vertical ridges. We shimmied up to the peak and perched at the very top. Our vantage for fire viewing was perfect there. My mother was likely downstairs doing chores, and certainly unaware of our activity.

We had been in bed, I believe, when my brother roused my sister and me to go on this adventure. He was older, and always took the lead on our most daring expeditions. I remember smelling smoke and wondering if the fire would come close. We lived near the forest, in the foothills of a northern Appalachian range.

My book, when it is finished, will be called Arrows Axes and Scythes. In it I try to capture a small slice of life--growing up poor, and free, in rural New York State.

I keep revisiting the pictures and text because they never seem just right. I was working on this picture a few hours ago, and will surely go back to it again. A previous blog featured another of my book entries: "A Memory".

It is perhaps audacious of me to create my own pictures, but there are few photos from my childhood. Even if there were photos, these would represent someone else's perspective, not mine.