Strega Rosa; Chapter 4
Chapter 4; Storm Window-1964 Detroit
by ©Antonia Teresa Amore-Broccoli
We lived in Detroit in an old red brick house on Ilene Street. I was five years old at the time. It was the summer before first grade when I was anticipating going to the same Catholic school that my four older siblings attended. My brothers and sisters had told me horror stories about the first grade teacher who worked there. She would hit kids with a ruler and would never let them go to the bathroom.
Also at this time, I soon figured out that the old storm door on the back side of our red brick house had a dual purpose, depending on the season. In the winter, its double-paned glass window provided shelter from the snow and cold. In the summer, the glass window was replaced with a screen to allow fresh air to enter the house through the back door. Our old house also had a built-in milk chute. Our mailman would deliver quart bottles of cold milk and eggs, leaving them in the milk chute, which was large enough for my slender kindergarten-size body to crawl through. The milk chute was near the entrance to the driveway and also provided me a fast getaway whenever I needed it. Usually no one in my family noticed my sudden disappearance.
As summer neared, Ma would remove the large square glass insert from the storm door and allow fresh air to pass through the screen. She’d use a long screwdriver with a wooden handle. Her arms seemed so strong in her blue knit shirt, which fit snugly around her shoulders. I would silently watch her as she loosened all four metal screws. She slipped the screws into the pocket of her form-fitting pants to free her hands. Then she pulled the glass frame from the door. The newly exposed screen door window held the promise that winter was finally over. Now the cool and later the stiff humid air would have room to travel. We had one or two fans whirring throughout the house. One always sat in the upstairs window, which made the long, stifling summer nights bearable.
I loved following Ma around when she did projects around the house, inside and outside. The year before when I was four and soon going into kindergarten, I watched Ma change out the storm door window and put in the metal screen. The heavy storm door slammed behind us as I quickly followed Ma. I remember tiptoeing down the basement stairs quietly, careful to line up the seams of my socks with the rubber strip on each step. My tiny toes ached from the rubber curves cutting through my socks, but I didn’t care. I wanted to follow exactly in my mother’s footsteps. She didn’t seem to notice this, as she tucked the glass window under the staircase and shooed me back upstairs. By changing the glass window insert for the screen insert, Ma was proclaiming the beginning of summer. This was exciting because it meant we would soon be planting our vegetable garden, filling it with tomatoes, sweet peppers, lettuce, and cucumbers.
Our parents learned from their parents the art of the cultivation of nutritious food. It was as if the art of growing vegetables was imprinted in our southern Italian peasant roots, or coded into our genealogy. It seemed to be in our blood. My maternal grandparents turned nearly every piece of earth in their backyard into garden space, including the back alley. Our west side Motown vegetable garden expanded right up to the property line near the Turner’s house, neighbors who had a big St. Bernard dog in their yard.
My paternal Grandmother Vittoria rented a large one bedroom apartment above a garage of Italian Paisans (friends) of hers. This was after her husband died in 1949 and there she had a quarter of an acre lot attached to her property. My paternal grandparents never owned a home. In 1963, these vegetable gardens lasted well into the fall or until the first snow fell, which was probably in October, right after Halloween. Unlike many other winters on the Great Lakes, 1963-64 had been an extremely long and cold one. I turned five in February of ‘64 so my memories of that time are vivid. I loved being outdoors in nature. In Detroit, snow was the one form of nature we could always count on, whether we liked it or not. The trees that lined the streets offered us shade and adventurous play.
One vivid memory I recall is when a group of neighborhood kids rolled huge snowballs down the middle of the street. It still amazes me. As the snowballs rolled, they quickly grew into gigantic balls of dirt and snow. They towered over even the tallest of kids. The weather remained cold then, so even as late as Mother’s Day in May, the ice on the Detroit River was still thick.
This year, although she was capable of doing it herself, Ma had been asking Pa to remove the storm door window. She had been asking him for weeks, but he just ignored her or made some excuse as to why it wasn’t a good time for him. Perhaps Ma hoped if Pa did these odd jobs around the house it would keep him home with us longer on Saturdays, and this would demonstrate proof that our family had some kind of normalcy. Ma and Pa had clear gender roles, even though Ma seemed to transgress them more than any other mother I knew. She seemed capable of doing nearly everything a daddy was supposed to do, at least back in 1964 and from a five year old’s perspective.
On this particular Saturday morning, Ma had placed the leftover braided Pane di Pasqua (Easter Bread) on a China plate, encircled with orange slices. Pa was drinking his coffee slowly and reading the paper. Ma asked him a second time, in an authoritative voice, if he would please remove the storm door window today before summer came. My sisters Franny, Mary, Eva, and I looked at one another furtively. Then we quickly looked away as Pa slowly pulled the coffee cup closer to him and firmly laid his newspaper down on the table. Our eyes were focused like laser beams on the orange slices as he stood and abruptly left the table. He went upstairs. A dead silence filled the room until Ma asked us to clear the table. To cut the tension in the room, I smiled at Eva and handed her an orange slice.
Upstairs, we could hear Pa’s heavy footsteps in the bedroom. Ma stalled in the kitchen, washing every dish and milk glass in slow motion, quietly as if a baby was asleep. Suddenly the sound of a thunder clap filled the staircase above. Pa came clomping heavily down the steps. Ma told us to hurry out the back door. But before we could argue with her that we were still in our pajamas, the front door slammed. Pa was gone. The walls shuttered and the ceramic Madonna perched above a painting of The Last Supper rattled on its shelf. Ma tossed the dish towel into the empty porcelain sink and mumbled under her breath “Sweet Jesus. Can’t ask that man for nothing!”
We all sighed with relief once he was gone. Pa’s rage was always unpredictable and often exploded out of the blue. It was something every one of us feared and anticipated with anxiety. There was a constant sense of terror, a deep fear we had of our father. It permeated our family home. It was in direct contrast to the soothing and predictable smell of our mother’s fresh tomato sauce, which simmered throughout the house every weekend, or the serenity of the various altars Ma had created and placed throughout our home. Her altars were adorned with Catholic saints and Madonna statues and carefully placed in every room.
On this day, after Pa took off, Ma disappeared upstairs. Eva and I were about to follow her but we stopped at the gold felt couch in the living room. To soothe ourselves, we cuddled together and started playing a counting game. As Eva counted some old cigarette butts in a glass ashtray, “1...2...3,” I instead imagined Ma puffing her Pall Mall cigarettes and sitting down to play a game of cards with us, rather than her usual “bridge club” girl-buddies. I wanted her to stay home with us, instead of leaving to hang out with her female friends, as she often did.
I knew how much Ma loved her women’s bridge club. It wasn’t really a formal bridge club, just a group of friends who were mostly sisters and neighbors of Marga, Ma’s best friend since grade school. We kids called her ‘Aunt’ even though she was not related by blood or marriage. The women drank tea and coffee and smokes Pall Malls while they played bridge and chatted. They always gathered alternately at someone’s home. I can still imagine them all laughing and having a good time. Marga’s little ones hid in her skirt or ran around the house. They were much better behaved children than we could ever be. Ma would sneak them dinner mints or pass them Joker cards under the card table. I wonder now if the women also had a bottle of J&B Black in the house.
Marga’s kids had it good. They got to stay with their mother all day, I guess because they were no trouble. Our mom was like a second mom to them, all ten of them. Marga was Catholic and Italian too but she didn’t believe in the rhythm method, which at the time my mother was trying to master. Marga and Ma were with one another every chance they got, and that was fairly often. It was too often by our standards, but not often enough for their liking.
Most days, Ma loved planning her escape for several hours to Marga's modest two bedroom home in suburban Allen Park. Within that suburban home, where they put all ten of those kids was pure magic. They had a long, narrow attic bedroom that was quite large for the girls and a basement room for the older boys. They also had a large living area for family gatherings and a playroom for all ten kids during the day.
We girls never really knew where Ma was going or what she was doing from one day to the next until the moment she descended the stairs, fully dressed. Once she was ready to leave, her red lipstick was always applied perfectly and looked as elegant as her outfits. She had a way of presenting herself that would make everyone look twice. She was a master at selecting a simple brooch on her sweater, or a pair of earrings sent from her older sister in Pittsburg, or just tossing a colorful scarf around her neck, which complimented her attractive figure and beautiful features. She dressed with such ease and finesse, you’d wonder if the gods themselves made her up behind that closed bedroom door. To me when she descended those stairs, she was a deity, a goddess, a fairy godmother soon to disappear from our view. I wondered if that whole vision of her coming down the stairs was just a dream.
On this particular day, it was no different. Ma descended the stairs dressed beautifully. “Franny, watch the girls. I’ll be back around five or six,” she explained to my older sister.
Our brother Tony was playing hockey for the high school team and Ralph was at church preparing for Sunday mass as an usher boy. This time in particular, Eva grabbed my hand as Ma walked out the door. Her eyes filled with tears as we heard the car tires rolling down the driveway, taking Ma away from us.
"Come on Eva, I can read you a story now,” I said, to reassure her. “Miss Ford taught me in school. Come upstairs and I’ll read you the farm story.” I always felt safe enough to speak to my sister, to comfort her, once Pa had left the house. Otherwise if he was home he was sure to hit me or put pepper on my thumb and make me suck it if I ever spoke even one word of Italian. He hated hearing me speak Italian, our original family language.
I believe this distaste for the Italian language was something Pa learned from the Sons of Italy, a local organization that was mentoring Italian immigrant families and helping them to assimilate into American culture. They encouraged immigrant families to speak English. Either way, I learned that staying silent was the safest choice for me, as I had not yet learned how to distinguish between Italian and English words. At age five, I actually couldn’t read yet, but I opened our Dr. Seuss books and made up words and stories to match the illustrations and to entertain my younger sister. Soon after we finished reading, Eva and I were both distracted and hungry. We ran downstairs with excitement. We had a brand new idea to play outside, but when we got downstairs, we found the house felt empty. It was a sad feeling and I wondered when we would see Ma again.
In the kitchen, I made us peanut butter sandwiches, spreading the peanut butter onto Ma’s home baked bread and adding grape jelly from the little Flintstone jar. Later on, Ma would magically wash those empty jelly jars with dish soap and they’d transform into juice or milk glasses. We had half a dozen jelly glasses to choose from, each one with tiny three-dimensional images of Bam Bam, Fred, Wilma, and the other Flintstone characters painted on the side. With a metal measuring cup, I scooped some powdered milk. I filled our glasses with water and mixed in the white powder, so proud that I could easily stir out the clumps without spilling milk on the yellow countertop.
In a few minutes, we went outside and began a game of red light, green light in the long, empty driveway. It was early summer, technically late spring. The usual pressure leading up to Easter Sunday was off me now because Easter had passed and I knew I wouldn’t have to wear a fancy Easter dress, one that matched my little sister Eva’s dress. I was in the clear for a while. Eva and I were both happier and more comfortable wearing our knit pants and baggy sweatshirts.
Although it was early summer, the air was still cool. Spring was like that in Motor City, a nickname for Detroit. Sometimes Nonno Papa Gio would put in his garden before Mother’s Day, only to have more freezing weather hit, and it would wipe out his new crop plants. He started the plants in his basement windows as seeds from last year's harvest. My Nonna Cristina and Nonno Gio loved to tell us stories about their eastside Motown vegetable garden. Years ago when my Momma was a child, Papa Gio began to place cardboard boxes over his newly planted crops to shelter them from an unpredictable freeze.
The kids weren’t out of school yet and I was in half-day kindergarten. Ma told the school administration that I missed school a lot because I was sick. But actually, I skipped school because I loved staying at our grandmother’s house. Sometimes I stayed all day with Eva at Nonna Cristina's house while Ma and Pa worked, and our four older siblings attended Saint Francis de Sales School. Pa was attending night school for accounting at Wayne University and he worked at a furniture store during the day. Ma worked as a bookkeeper for the Catholic School, the same school where our four older siblings attended. Ma’s bookkeeping covered the cost of their tuition.
But as of January 24, 1964, Eva and I were no longer staying at Nonna Cristina’s house. This was because on January 24, 1964, our Nonna had died unexpectedly after taking a bad fall. She had woken up in the middle of the night to answer the phone in her kitchen. Sadly, it ended up being the wrong number. Walking in her dark kitchen, Nonna slipped and fell hard. She got hurt, all because of that phone call. After her fall, Nonno Gio (Joe) called Momma to come over the next day as Nonna Cristina was bedridden and very weak. All I remember from that fateful day is the ambulance coming to take my Nonna Cristina away. That would be the last time Eva and I would see her until the day of her funeral. The family was shocked and devastated. I remember my Pa coming to our bedroom late at night and telling us that Nonna Cristina had died. Ma was with her father and siblings on the night Nonna died. So Pa came to speak to us four girls, at least three of whom were still sleeping in the same bed. I don't remember anyone having an emotional response, hearing the news. Maybe we were all in shock. It was as if time stood still and the air we breathed became cold, like the icicles hanging outside our bedroom window on that January night. I went to sleep feeling so afraid and alone in my thoughts. At that age, I didn’t comprehend the permanency of death, nor did I understand whether there was a heaven. If so, I had no idea where it might be. But everyone said Nonna was on her way there.
At her funeral, Nonna was laid out as perfectly and beautifully as she was when she was alive. For three to five days family members and friends from all over Detroit and as far away as Pittsburg, Pennsylvania came to pay their respects. I met cousins and relatives I never knew I had. The cousins visiting from Pittsburg were my Nonna Cristina's oldest daughter's children. They were such beautiful girls, nicely dressed and so well mannered, unlike my other cousins who were all boys. Us grandchildren were only allowed to come for the rosary ritual, which was filled with numerous Hail Marys that seemed to last for hours into the night. Nonna Cristina was a deity to me. She was my first example of an Amazon woman, with her 300 - 350 pound frame and large bosom. She was taller than all the women in our family, standing at least of 5’5.” I know in our family photos she always towered over my Papa Gio. Nonna had a head of hair full of soft gray curls with hints of disappearing red. She had strong, round cheekbones and a soft complexion. Her freckles were bright in the summer, but faded in the winter. Seeing Nonna in her casket, I longed to climb in there and nuzzle my face into her bosom, as I had done when she was alive. I imagined her arms encircling me, and I felt a deep feeling of safety and warmth. I was even willing to go far away with her. I would accompany her to heaven if I could.
Seeing Nonna Cristina's silent stance laying in her casket was my first experience of inconsolable grief. This deep grief was something I would feel many times in my life for a woman I was losing. In fact, this feeling would become quite familiar to me, so familiar that it would almost be a strange comfort, to deeply miss someone female and to long to be reunited with her. This feeling originally started with my Mama. But when we lost Nonna Cristina, in addition to grief, it was the first time I had experienced the permanent separation of death.
Later we learned that Nonna Cristina had ruptured her spleen from the fall but the doctors at the hospital didn’t know this at the time. Therefore they were unable to save her. My aunt and uncles would recite the story over and over, and I always heard them say “Those damn doctors killed Ma.” She was 78 years old.
Ever since her passing we would sometimes go to our Uncle Sal’s and Aunt Jenny’s house in Highland Park on days when our parents were at work. I wasn’t so thrilled with that arrangement. So that’s when I decided to make up all my absent kindergarten days by going back to school. We hated going to Uncle Sal’s house. It wasn’t so bad at their house when we stayed in the kitchen with Aunt Jenny. In her kitchen, we would play board games while she prepared our dinner. That was okay. It was being around Uncle Sal that was scary. He was not Italian and gentle mannered like my Ma’s brothers. He made all us girls very uncomfortable.
Eva had turned three on my birthday that late February. I had turned five. Eva and I were born on the same day, but two years and twelve hours apart, down to the minute. Everyone joked that Eva was my birthday present. They said we were both born during the winter’s worst storm of the season. Because of this, I called Eva my snow angel and my best friend. I loved that she was born on my birthday. I had a companion now, and was never alone anymore. My older siblings seemed much older than the two of us. We were so very close when we were little. Eva’s hand usually wasn’t far from mine at that young age.
As I described earlier, I often hated that we were expected to get dressed up in girly dresses for big Sunday family dinners and for holidays. On birthdays and holidays, Eva and I would wear the exact same bright-colored often handmade outfits. I didn’t mind too much that we were treated like twins. I just hated the frilly dresses and all the attention they brought to us. I felt silly and vulnerable. I always managed to leave Eva in the spotlight, with her brown curly hair and her chatty words. Instead, I would escape to the outer limits of the neighborhood.
Everyone called Eva Shirley Temple, with her sweet little dimples and her curly hair. She looked like Ma and Pa combined. They also called her “chatty Evie” because she talked so much. On the other hand, I was her complete opposite. I was quiet and even silent. There was discussions about the color of my hair. My father's olive and dark-skinned cousins actually accused Ma of dying my hair, because of its unusual color. “How can a little girl’s hair have so many different shades of red, brown, and blonde?” they would say. “Ahh, you must have used foil highlights with a rinse.”
Nonna Cristina always came to Ma’s defense. “She has hair like I did as a girl. She’s our American girl.”
“Oh, she’s a ‘Strega Rosa’” my cousins would whisper to each other, a term they used in southern Italy to refer to the redheaded girls or women. It means red witch.
On that particular morning after Ma had rolled out of the driveway in her car, Eva and I were playing outside, running around pretending to be cars. The adults around us always seemed to be going somewhere in their cars, so Eva and I wanted to be in cars too so we could pretend to go places. I was a long blue Pontiac station wagon like the one Ma drove. Eva was our neighbor Mrs. McBrides’ car, a large, older Buick, yellow with a rounded roof like the Jetson's flying space mobile. A green light meant we could go, and away we flew, racing down the long driveway from the backyard. While we were playing, suddenly in the front of the house we heard a car drive up.
“Here comes a policeman, ‘carabiniere,’” I said, and all of us stopped dead in our tracks. We spotted the stainless steel fins of the back end of this car and knew immediately it was Pa’s. He had been gone for a few hours by now. We forgot he had even been gone till we recognized his car. Once we realized it was him, we ran faster than ever into the backyard, hiding from his view. Quietly, sitting under the big white oak tree, hoping he’d never notice that we were even home, we placed our hands over our eyes in a muted game of hide and seek.
But Pa must must have known we were home. Before long, his voice came, muffled but loud as he opened the front door of the house.
“Terry, Terry! Where is your mother?” he yelled my name.
“We’re playing,” Eva responded.
“High See,” I confirmed.
“It’s ‘Hide and Seek,’” he corrected me sharply. Then, “Hey Stupid, come to the side door and help me with the storm window.”
The moment he said that, I suddenly felt as if my sneakers were glued to the grass. I looked down past my skinny legs at my white untied laces. At that moment, I regretted not asking Ma to tie my shoes before she left. I couldn’t tie them yet like the big kids. It took me an eternity to tie my shoelaces, slowly making the figure eight fit perfectly in my thumb.would tie the loops together and circle one loop over the other until I'd have two complete loops. I would clench my tongue between my teeth in deep concentration while doing this.
“Terry, where are you?” Pa yelled angrily for me again, this time using my formal name “Teresa.” Instantly, I went running toward the side yard pretending the street light turned green and I was the blue Pontiac, big and strong. Papa was standing at the storm door where earlier today Ma had asked him to change out the heavy glass and replace it with the metal screen. The heavy glass window framed by the metal door was milky white from the winter cold condensation. I looked straight ahead when I approached him, peering intently at the inserted storm window. Was he going to replace it and finally do what Mama had been asking him to do for so many weeks now? He seemed extra tall as he held out the screwdriver with the wooden handle. I didn’t know exactly what he wanted me to do, but I so desperately wanted to get it right.
In his 5’3” Napoleon frame, to me Papa seemed to stand as tall as a giant. He extended his large hand out in a quick jolt which indicated to me his impatient agitation. His grip on the screwdriver was so tight I could see the veins popping out in his neck.
“Hold the screwdriver for me while I pull the glass window out of this goddamn door,” he ordered. In a knee-jerk reaction, trying to follow his command and get it right, I reached out to his thick hand and grabbed the metal part of the screwdriver. But he yanked the screwdriver back: “Basta! No dummy, take it by the handle!”
Papa flipped the screwdriver around to hand me the wooden end. He looked straight down at my untied shoelaces. As he glared at my shoes, I knew in that exact instant that I was not going to get it right. The screwdriver slipped out of my hand and the Phillips tip flung into the new grass growing between the two cement strips that held the weight of his station wagon in our driveway. A moment later, the screwdriver poked straight up between the blades of newly grown grass. I walked over and bent down to pick it up by the wooden handle.
Suddenly I felt Pa’s big hands above me slamming down on my neck and back. He pounded my back and knocked me down. My feet flew from the soft grass. I felt my heels lift out of my sneakers. Suddenly everything seemed to be moving in slow motion. Metal screws, Papa's blue plaid shirt, the metal summer screen in the foreground. I ducked my head into my chin. Then bam, I heard a loud crash. At that moment, the glass window was breaking and I left my body. I don’t remember feeling anything after that. The force of his sudden blow on my back stunned me into silence. I started to descend into a spinning tunnel that was so familiar to me. I kept my eyes shut tightly. I seemed to be spinning in a vortex. All I could see were black fiery sparks entwined with purple sparks and the color blue..
I could barely hear a thing. Eva's footsteps in the yard seemed miles away as she approached us. Then suddenly my knees hit hard onto the cement path underneath me. I peeked, slightly opening my eyes to see the wooden handled screwdriver still laying in the grass.
Suddenly, a stream of red blood shot straight up from my tiny wrist into the air. My instinct was to pull my stinging wrist back against my tummy. At that moment, I realized my hand had slammed against the glass window on that old storm door. I realized in a daze that the loud crash I had heard a moment ago was the sound of breaking glass and my hand and arm were what broke the glass. Firmly, I held my right arm with my left hand, trying to protect it from falling off at my elbow. I sat there amazed, watching a stream of red blood fly from a large open cut on the inside of my right wrist. My eyes followed the magnificent colors of red and purple as they shot straight up in a single arc to the sky. The bright sunlight in the sky scattered prisms of color across my freckled skin.
Suddenly, the wooden door opposite the metal door with the broken glass flung open. My sister Franny had opened the door in shock, coming to see what had happened. Behind the broken glass, with blurry vision, I could see Franny. She stood and screamed for what seemed like a full second or two and then she vanished out of my sight. I wondered where she went as I heard the sound of Pa's car skidding off. Eva ran past me to the street, chasing his car, crying and screaming.
"Papa! Papa! Daddy! Daddy come back! Terry's hurt!" she cried. I felt terribly alone but comforted by Eva's presence and her persistence in getting me some help. Then from the corner of my eye, I could see the tail end of our neighbor Mrs. McBride's car approaching us from across the street. At that moment, all I could hear was Eva’s frantic voice fading into the background “Mrs. McBride, help us, help us,” she screamed. Then I must have passed out.
I awakened in a small metal crib in a hospital bed with a green kitchen towel wrapped around my wrist like a baseball mitt. I recognized the tiny printed green grape leaves from Mrs. McBrides’ kitchen. Now the towel was soaked in my own red blood. A nurse was peering into my eyes, shining a bright white light.
"Stay awake Teresa. Keep your eyes open. We’re waiting for your mother." But I couldn’t remain awake and drifted asleep again for a few minutes. When I woke up, they were unwrapping the towel and I saw red blood rushing down my arm. I began screaming.
The nurse, who had ratty brunette hair beneath her nurse’s cap, said "Everything’s ok now. We're gonna take really good care of you." Her eyes were big and brown. "Your brother Ralph is here, so we can take care of you now. He can sign the hospital papers so we can take care of you. Hold my hand. Everything's gonna be ok."
Her brown eyes were all I could see, and I mistook them for my Nonna Cristina, who was long dead, although I could still feel her presence. Soon they were shooting a large needle into my open wound. It stung my wrist worse than it felt when I got hurt in the driveway. The pain woke me up but only for a few moments. I faded in and out of awareness again, pretending to be the Pontiac station wagon flying through all the lights, red and green, and stopping for nothing.
Falling into a deep dream, I felt myself spinning down a familiar tunnel of rainbow colors that faded into shadows of gray and black. Thoughts and familiar voices speaking in Italian and English were racing through my mind. “Stupido, good for nothing. Can't you speak like an American? She hears what she wants to hear. She ain't deaf."
Suddenly, an intrusive, alarming, bright light woke me up. I began to scream and howl once again, kicking my feet and jerking my body from left to right. Then I realized I was being restrained by leather straps fastened to my wrists and ankles. I was tied to a metal crib.
"Calm down. It's ok, calm down." I heard a woman's soft voice say. “It's all done. If you lay still, I'll let you lose." I was aware that I was tied down with thick leather straps to the hospital bed. I lay silent and turned my head to the side with my chin against my chest. "There's nothing to be afraid of now. I won't hurt you,” said the nurse. “We're all done.You’re ok. Can you tell me what happened today? How did you cut your wrist?"
I remained silent and kept my eyes closed, pretending to be the Pontiac again. I was so stunned by what was happening to me, I fell back deeply into silence, in what seemed to be a safe place, hiding deep within myself. I laid there in silence. I had no words to respond to the sweet nurse as she covered me in a heated cotton blanket and I fell back asleep.
©Antonia Teresa Amore Broccoli, LCSW
