Before we settled in a row of tract, before we settled at all, we scrambled about from one concrete site to another in a small travel trailer.  This particular travel trailer replaced a former that was destroyed in an Idaho storm when I was but four months old.

The story I heard my mother tell was that the trailer began to sway while Rander drove.  Somehow she had the wherewithal to run and grab her babe.  My brother, five years older, was riding in the cabin with my father.  In my mother's version, she had no sooner lifted me from where I lay sleeping when a television soared off the stand and crashed  upon my fresh imprint.  This near death fiasco so close to the fact that my mere conception was post a late season miscarriage, led my mother to believe in the intention of my birth.

For about a year, we lived in a pitted lot overlooking a stretch of beach near Lompoc.  In the pictures I have of my mother she is soft glamour amidst dilapidation.  She in her skirts and cotton blouses.  My brother soon made friends with the hoboes who ate better for at least a year due to my mother's generous offerings.  Apparently the relationship was allowed to continue until  he incorporated and slipped a string of colorful phrases  into our compact home .

(L-R children on the beach - Randy, Teresa, Fern), Long Beach, California, 1959

My father's work hours began early and ended late, but on the weekends he was free and on reserve.  Each Saturday, these Saturdays long before lawn clippings and cans and beef barbecue, he removed the dust and grit and damned-ness of his week and pulled slick waders in their place.  I often sat and watched him fish.  He knee deep in the surf, me buried in the sand, my brother God knows where, my mother boiling coffee.

I composed verses there on the shore.  I did not know it yet that I was writing.  Only that the ocean blue carried me too, adrift and beyond.  I sang for captains in the offing.  I was just a girl contented in her own head, with a brother at play, a mother who called me the minstrel, and a father bringing fish for dinner.  Years later, I began to write everything down.  Boxes have since trailed my life, boxes filled with letters and hoarded scrap.  Still, I'd love to know the words now lost to Euclidean, the words waves once washed from a tender line and carried on divided cleft to some imperceptible space.

Teresa Price © 2010
rev/2016