A Fairytale

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Self-Reliance

Prompt by Mary Jaksch

Emerson says: “Always do what you are afraid to do.”

What is ‘too scary’ to write about? Try doing it now.

The tires of the moving truck get stuck in the mud in pretty much the same place where uncle Sander's wheels spun around without finding traction the day we came to look at the farm in the middle of the fields. Only this time throwing rags in front of the tires doesn't help. Papa and the driver light a cigarette. On the other side of the wide ditch that runs the length of the dirt path that leads toward our new home, a man in dark blue overalls, followed by a little girl, appears from the side door of a brick farmhouse that's attached to a large barn. The girl steps into her wooden clogs, the man slides his stockinged feet into dirt covered rubber boots.
"Pigs," Papa says, "You hear the oinkers Shudy?"
The man drops a plank from his side to ours across the ditch.
I wave at the little girl and she waves back.
The man is going to get his tractor and pull the van out of the mud, but he has to drive around and through the fields.
Mama and I walk all the way back to the main road and then the same way back only on the other side of the ditch to where the man and the little girl came out of the house. Mama knocks on the door of the farmhouse, she needs to go, I don't.
The little girl shows me a deep square hole in the ground, filled with water. "Our swimming pool," she says.
Mama returns and pulls me away from the hole. It's the cellar for the house the girl's parents are going to build. They will have a WC, hot and cold running water, and a shower too, the girl says.

We are going back to nature and have none of those luxuries. 

This is not picture of ours!

We have a fairytale well with a bucket on a rope and two wrought iron pumps. One is on the terrace outside the small brick house where people used to cook and do the laundry, and one inside the barn, near the door to the hallway.
(to be continued)

So what is scary about this you may wonder. Well, let's say the scary stuff is yet to come, got to start somewhere, with spinning wheels, and getting stuck in the mud, a foreshadowing of never getting out of the drowning hole...

This work by by Judith van Praag is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.