death, labour, & fear: my young self’s precocious introduction to the elements of life

============================================

It was the morning that the dog got rabies. I remembered because it left mother no choice but to hit the dog’s head with a shovel. And before she did, she threw a sack on the puppy to keep it from running around like mad, growling and salivating and threatening to bite. We were five small children getting ready for school and the three-minute walk that would take us there. We looked on as the small heap under the sack lay motionless after the third blow.

============================================

One gloomy afternoon, after mother had retrieved the not-really-sun-dried pieces of apparel from the clothesline, she called me into the living room. The clouds were swollen with the notion of rain and she said I’d better get inside the house and help her fold the laundry. I was bad at folding shirts and shorts. She didn’t mind. After a while, when I gave up altogether, someone –my sister or my father, I can’t recall now–someone came in with a toy and I abandoned my duty (or my mother’s attempt at introducing ‘work’ into a child’s routine). It was a light, plastic toy in the shape of an alligator (or crocodile, I was to know the difference at a later time) and it had a basket on its mouth with a lightweight ball. You were supposed to blow into the small opening on its tail-end and it would send the ball afloat. It was a much better case of worry to keep the ball afloat than folding the shirts into neat squares.

 ============================================

Before that moment, I didn’t know the earth was so fragile that it could be quaked. My mother, and someone else–probably a nanny or a niece–were having fun just teasing me, the only child at home. I’m guessing it was a time when my older sister was in pre-school and Mama was still pregnant with my younger sister. On that lazy afternoon they found amusement in rolling me into the carpet and lifting me up to my feet. Of course, I had lost the facility of my limbs and could only mince through the living room wrapped in the stiffness of the carpet. Apparently I looked funny because my movements set them off to boisterous laughter, and as with any child the proportionate response was to keep at it. I was several steps from mother when I started losing balance. The adults started saying ‘It’s an earthquake…’ and I didn’t know what that meant. I had only to look at their eyes and recognize alarm and agitation. Mama started to walk towards me and struggled to un-roll me. I had started to cry.