An egg—I sat up in a bed cloud of Plautdietsch, aware of where she came from. The bed was a shoreline, and words were a secret language used by the adults conspired against my siblings. The room smelled of bread yeast where my mother no longer stands like she used to. Above the fireplace, my father learned to understand most and speak some by carving toys with his eyes. The place was a top floor walk-up where he used the words to tell dirty jokes to his friends. On the same block, somewhere in the background, the 500-year-old oral dialect.

She’d been there once before, saw his ghost in the mirror river crystallized on his tongue. She walked over the window, toward one of many dialects. The air was bitter and flat because the northern plains but also because the people were simple. It was mid-afternoon, and the bird in the cuckoo clock whispered “our only homeland is our mother tongue,” but a word is a bottomless pit. It was maybe ten years cycling between persecution and exploitation, hence mother’s tongue extended all over the world. She was a nonconformist, a non-integrator knowing not much else was holding together across time and space. She lived in a place between teeth hiding out in a journey not as planned. She was like a character-song singing lost contact. There was an undercurrent of upheaval baptizing her in the faith.

I was red-gold hair eyes privileged with responsibilities of citizenship. I worked as I wounded, survived the war. Others lived as husband and wife, brother, sister, cousins—hard to tell walking through the heather.

Her friends had their own primitive way of looking at things, which became a lifelong hobby. She asked him once, “who’s evil eye?” and he said she need help. According to him, Dracula ruled the world, setting out to achieve our goals. Being the heir of the 40’s and 50’s culture, God could not always help her. Practically speaking, she needed the aid of a computer spell-check program.

Within 10 years time, I will translate story oral history on paper. With folk songs embedded in my eyes like a religious employment was not easy to come by. Folk songs transcended the immediate culture, so come down off the trees and confess.

Before, she moved into a place of her own accidentally too close to the action. Sometimes, for a night or two, a strange feeling that she was somehow physically removed from what was going on around her and was watching the show. She stayed in endless streams of human misery.

I probably stayed in the echo of that flat northern vista too long.