Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
Once upon a time there was a circus performer. She arrived from the old country, landing in NYC with a babe on her front and a gold coin in her pocket.
Central Park was the largest open aired big top she had ever laid her eyes upon. Her son, happy in his place, woven to her back, participated with or without conscious knowledge of drawing in the crowds as his Mother performed feats of dare defying acts on a tight rope she pulled from the only bag she arrived with on the Island. It also contained an image of her husband. He was killed before her babe was born. He too a circus performer, killed in a train derailing.
The New World called her, NYC, the place of her dreams. The place she knew, mythologically as where she could be free and find her place of belonging.
Between two old Oaks she walked the tight rope, babe in tow, day after day after day. At night she slept in the shade of the Oaks, knowing full well from the life of her past that the earth beneath her feet and at times the air beneath her feet held her solid.
Every day she drew the crowds, everyday they grew larger and larger. Everyday she gave thanks for this life that meant she was free to do what she loved, feed her baby and sleep on the green, green grass of the beauty that is Central Park.
It did begin to get cold. The leaves did begin to fall from the Oaks. And nights did begin to cool right down. In her evenings, she began to knit and knit and knit in preparation for the cold that would come. Not a cold like she had experienced before, but a NYC cold. A cold that would bring the joy of the skaters to the park, that would bring the smell of roasted chestnuts and the joy of hot chocolate.
Warming her nest, her baby grew and he grew and he grew towards the dawning of winter. Autumn came and autumn went, and the snow mounted in the skies above.
One day as she was devising a winter hammock home for her and her babe, when a package appeared. It was addressed to the Tightrope Walker and her Son. She looked around her. In the distance she could see a bicycle crossing the bridge over Swan Lake.
Because of that moment, that magical moment (as it became known to her), the moment she saw the bicycle and the bridge and the frozen Swan Lake, she found herself no longer living in what was becoming a crumpled, too small life for her and her soon to be crawling babe, she found herself on top of the world.
A key. An address. A miracle.
A high rise, empty but clean apartment with furnishings unlike she had ever imagined before and knew could have only been dreamed up by the kindness of hearts, a window open and caged and soft with the fur skins of sheep, a place for her babe.
And because of that, she found her self at HOME in NYC.
Her child free to breathe the air of the birds, her soul free to dream and imagine and realise a soft place for she and her babe to watch the snow fall.
And still she walked the tight rope by day and in the spring and summer by night.
Until finally She was the Woman who came to NYC from the Motherland with a babe on her back, who walked the tightrope between the Oaks of NYC and by winter, watching Swan Lake turn to ice and the last of the bicycles head into hibernation, she and her son, now toddling learned to skate.
Wollman Rink the playground of a boy and his mother. Smiling as flakes of snow danced this snow globe of wonderland into the good life and the magical reality.
THE END