I grew up in a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house on E. Lee Road in Taylors, SC.
Sometimes, I dream I am looking through the bedroom I shared with my 2 younger brothers, wondering who is in that room now.
As a child, I shared a room with my brothers.
The empty bedroom became a guest bedroom for visitors to our home.
I the room I shared with my brothers, there were 2 twin sized beds. I shared one of the beds with my baby brother who was seven years younger than me. I cared for him if he woke afraid in the night.
One night, he sat up in bed. “What’s wrong,” I asked groggily. “He looked at me with a pale face and threw up his evening grape juice all over us!
Mom snatched up out of the bed and placed us in the bathtub where we stood under a warm shower in out pj’s until we were clean again.
The year I went to middle school, I moved into the guest room. It became my room. I hung a poster of Dr. J, Julius Erving, my favorite NBA basketball player for my favorite NBA basketball team, the Philadelphia 76ers on the wall above.
An old rocking chair in which Mom rocked me to sleep when I was a baby stood in the corner of the room.
My bed was a double bed, twice as big as my twin bed with one less person in it.
It seemed as if I were floating in a vast ocean when I was laying in the middle of it.
The head of the bed was against the wall.
There were no walls beside the bed, only open spaces.
There was no place for me to put my hand against something solid as I tried to drift off to sleep at night.
So I would raise my knees and rock myself back and forth until I fell asleep, as if Mom were rocking me in the rocking chair.
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