The Scent of Apples

Bienvenido Santos

                When I arrived in Kalamazoo, it was October and the war was still on. Gold and silver star hung on pennants asbove silent windows of white and brick-red cottages. In a backyard, an old man burned leaves and twigs while a grey-haired woman sat on the porch, her lap, watching the smoke rising above the elms, both of them thinking of the same thought perhaps about a tall, grinning boy with blue eyes and flying hair, who went to the war, where could he be now this month when leaves were turning into gold and the fragrance of gathered apples was in the wind?
                It was a cold night when I left my room at the hotel for a usual speaking engagement. I walked but a little way. A heavy wind coming up from lake but a little way. A heavy wind coming up from lake Michigan was icy on the face. it felt like winter spraying early in the northern woodland. Under the lampshots, the leaves shone like bronze. And they rolled on the pavements like the ghost feet of a thousands autumns long dead, long before the boys left for faraway lands without great icy winds and promise of winter early in the air, lands without trees, the singing and gold!
               It was the same night I met Celestino Fabia, "just a Filipino farmer" as he called himself; who had a farm about thirty miles east of Kalamazoo.
             " I've seen no Filipino for so many years now," he answered quickly, "so when I saw your name in the papers where it says you come from the island and that you've going to come to talk, I come right away."
              Early that night I had addressed a college crowd, mostly women. It appeared that they wanted me to tell them things about my country: they wanted me to tell them things about my country: they wanted me to tell them things about my country because my country has become a lost country. Everywhere in the land the enemy stalked. Over it a great silence hung: and in some little known island on the pacific, young boys all, hardy men, thinking of harvest moons and smell of forest fires.
            It was not hard talking about our own people.I know them well and I loved them well and I loved them.And they seemed so far away during those terrible years that I must have spoken of them with a little favor , a little nostagia .
            In the open forum that followed, the audience wanted to know whether there is much difference  between our women and the American women. I tried to answer as best as I could, saying among other things ,that I did not know much about American women women except that they looked friendly.but differences or similarities in inner qualities as such naturally belonged to the heart or to the mind. I could only speak about with vagueness.
           While I was trying to explain away the fact that it was not easy to make comparisons, a man rose from the rear of the hall, wanting to say something. In a distance, he looked slight, old and very brown.
           "I'm a Filipino." he began, loud and clear, in a voice that seemed to be used to wide open spaces. "I'm just a Filipinofarmer out in the country." He waves his hand towards the door. "I left the Philippines more than twenty years ago and have been back. Never will perhaps. I want to find out, sir are our Filipino women the same like they were twenty year's ago?"
              As he sat down, the hall filled with voices, hushed and intrigued. I weighed my answer carefully. I did not want to tell a lie yet I did not want to say anything that would seem platitudinous, insincere. But more important than these considerations, it seemed to me that moment as I looked towards my countryman, I must give him an answer that would not make him unhappy. Surely, all these years, he must have held on to certain ideals, certain beliefs, even illusions peculiar to the exile.
            "First," I said as the voices gradually died down, every eye seemed upon me."First, tell me what our women were twenty years ago."
            The man stood to answer. "Yes," he said, "you,re too young... Twenty years ago our women were nice, they were modest, they wore their hair long, and they dress proper and went for no monkey business. They were natural, they went to church regularly, and they were faithful." He had spoken slowly, and now in what seemed like an afterthought, added, "It's the men who ain't."
            Now, I know what I was going to say. "Well," I began, it will interest you to know that our women have changed-definitely! The change, however, has been on the outside only . Inside here." pointing to the heart, "they are the same twenty years ago- God-fearing, faithful, modest and nice."
           The man was visibly moved. "I'm very happy sir," he said in manner of one who, having stakes on the land, had found no cause to regret one's  sentimental investment.
           After this, everything that was said and done in the hall that night seemed like an anti-climax and later, as we walk outside he gave me his name and told me of his farm thirty miles east of the city.
          We had stopped at the main entrance of the hotel lobby. We had not talked very much on the way. As a matter of fact, we were never alone. Kindly American friends talked to us, asked us questions, said good night. So now I asked him whether he cared to step into the lobby with me and talk.
          "No thank you," he said, "you are tired. And I don't want to stay out too late."
          "Yes, you live very far."
          "I got a car," he said , "besides..."
           Now he smiled, he truly smiled. All night I had been watching his face and I wondered when he was going to smile.
          "Will you do me a favor please?" he continued, smiling almost sweetly. "I want you to have dinner with my family out in the country. I'd call for you tomorrow afternoon, then drive you back. Will that be all right?"
           "Of course," I said. "I said. "I'd love to meet your family. I was leaving Kalamazoo for Muncie, Indiana, in two days. There is still plenty of time."
            "You will make my wife very happy," he said.
            "You flatter me."
            "Honest, she 'll be very happy. Ruth is a country girl and hasn't met any Filipinos younger than I, cleaner looking. We're just poor farmer folks, you know, and we don't get to town very often. Roger, that's my boy, he goes to school in town. A bus takes him early in the morning and  he's back in the afternoon. He's a nice boy.
            "Roger, he'd be tall. You'll like him."
             Then, he said goodbye and I waved to him as he disappeared in the darkness.
             The next day he came, at about three in the afternoon. There was a mild, ineffectual sun shining; and it was not cold. He was wearing an old brown tweed jacket and worsted trousers to match. His shoes were polished, and although the green of his tie seemed faded, a colored shirt hardly accentuated it. He looked younger than he appeared the night before now that he was clean-shave and seemed ready to go to a party. He was grinning as we met.
            "Oh, Ruth can''t believe it. She can't believe it," he kept repeating as he led me to his car- a nondescript thing in faded black and had known better days and many hands. "I said to her,' I'm bringing you a first class Filipino. But Roger, that's my boy, he believed me immediately. 'What's he like, Daddy? he asked. 'Oh, you will see, i say he's first class.''Like you daddy?' 'No,no,' I laughed at him, 'you're daddy ain't first class.' Aw, but you are Daddy, he says. So you can see what a nice boy he is, innocent. Then Ruth starts griping about the house, but the house is a mess, she says. True, it's a mess, it's always a mess, but you don't mind, do you? We're poor folks, you know."
             The trip seemed interminable. We passed through narrow lanes and disappeared into the thickest, and came out on barren land overgrown with weeds in places. All around were dead leaves and dry earth. In the distance were apple trees.
             "Aren't those apple trees?" I asked wanting to be sure.
             "Yes, those are apple trees," he replied. "Do you like apples? I got lots of 'em. I got an apple orchard. I'll show you."
              All the beauty in the afternoon seemed in the distance, on the hills, in the dull soft sky.
              "Those trees are beautiful on the hills," I said.
              "Autumn's a lovely season. The trees are getting ready to die, and they show their color, proud like."
              "No such thing in our country," I said.
               That remark seemed unkind, I realized later. It touched him off on a long deserted tangent, but ever there perhaps. How many times did the lonely mind take unpleasant detours away from the familiar winding lanes towards home for fear of this, the remembered hurt, the long lost youth, the grim shadows of the years; how many times indeed, only the exile knows...
               It was a rugged road we were traveling and the car so much noise that I could not hear everything he said, but I understood him. He was telling his story for the first time in many years. He was remembering his own youth. He was thinking of home.In these odd moments there seemed no cause at all, no pain. That would come later. In the night perhaps. Or lonely on the farm under the apple trees.
             "In this old Visayan town, the streets are narrow and dirty and strewn with coral shells. You have been there? You couldn't have missed our house, it was the biggest in the town, one of the oldest, our's was a big family. The house stood right on the edge of the street. A door opened heavily and you enter a dark hall leading to the stairs. There is the smell of the chicken roasting on the low-topped, walls, there is the familiar sound they make and you grope your way up a massive staircase, the banisters smooth upon the trembling hand. Such nights, there are no better than the days, windows are closed against the sun; they closed heavily.
              Mother sits in her corner, sitting very white and sick. This was her world, her domain. In all these years, I cannot remember the sound of her voice. Father was different. He moved about. He shouted, he ranted. He lived in the past and talk of honor as if it were the only thing.
             I was born in that house. I grew up there into a pampered brat. I was mean.
             One day I broke their hearts. I saw mother cry wordlessly as father heaped curse upon me and drove me out of the house, the gate closing heavily after me and multiplied it numberless times in their own hearts. I was no good.
            But sometimes, you know, I miss that house, the roasting chicken on the low-topped walls. I miss my brother and sisters. Mother sitting in her chair, looking like a pale ghost in the corner of the room. I would remember the great live posts, massive tree trunks from the forests. Leafy plants grow in the sides, buds pointing downwards, wilted and die before they become flowers. As they fell on the floor, Father bent to pick them and throw them out in the coral streets...
            Finally, we rounded a deep curve and suddenly came upon a shanty, all but ready to crumble in a head on the ground, its plastered walls were rotting away, the floor was hardly a foot from the ground . I thought of the cottages  of the poor colored folks in the south, the hovels of the poor everywhere in the land. This one stood all by itself as though by common consent all the folks that used to live here had decided to stay away despising it, ashamed of it. Even the lovely season could not color it with beauty.
             A dog barked loudly as we approached. A fat blonde woman stood at the door with a little boy by her side, Roger seemed newly scrubbed. He hardly took his eyes off me.Ruth had a clean apron around her shapeless waist. Now as she shook my hands in sincere delight I noticed shame facedly (that I should noticed) how rough her hands, so course and red with labor, how ugly! She was no longer young and her smile was pathetic.
            As we stepped inside, the door closed behind us, immediately I was aware of the familiar scent of apples. The room was bare except for the few ancient pieces of second-hand furniture. In the middle of the room stood a stove to keep the family warm in the winter. The walls were bare. Over the dining table hung a lamp yet unlighted.
            Ruth got busy with the drinks. She kept coming in and out of a rear room that must have been the kitchen and soon the table was heavy with food, fried chicken legs and rice, and green peas and corn on the rear. Even as we ate, Ruth kept standing, and going to the kitchen for more food. Roger is like a little gentleman.
            "Isn't he nice looking?" the father asked.
            "You are a handsome boy, Roger," I said.
             The boy smile at me, "You look like Daddy," he said.
             Afterwards I noticed an old picture leaning on top of the dresser and stood to pick it up. It was yellow and soiled with many fingerings. The faded figure of a woman in the Philippine dress could yet be distinguised althoughthe face had become a blur.
             "Your..." I began.
             " I don't know who she is," Fabia hastened to say. "I picked that picture many years ago in the room on the La Salle Street in Chicago. I have often wondered who she is."
              "The face wasn't a blur in the beginning?'
                "Oh no. It was a young face and good."
                Ruth came with a plate full of apples.
               "A," I cried, picking out a ripe one.
               "I've been thinking where all the scents of apples came from. The room is full of it."
               "I'll show you," said Fabia.
                He showed me backroom, not very big. It was half full of apples.
               "Everyday," he explained, "I take some of them to town to sell to the groceries. Prices have been low. I've been losing on the trips.
               "These apples will spoil," I said.
               "We'll feed them to the pigs."
               Then he showed me around the farm. It was twilight now and the apple trees stood bare against the glowing western sky. In apple blossom time it must be lovely here, I thought.But what about the winter time.
                One day, according to Fabia, a few years ago, before Roger was born, he had an attack of acute appendicitis. It was deep winter. The snow lay heavy everywhere. Ruth was pregnant and not well herself.At first she did not know what to do. She bundled him a warm clothing and put in a cot near the stove. She shoveled the snow from their front door and practically carried the suffering  man on her shoulders, dragging him through the newly made path towards the road where they waited for the US mail car to pass. Meanwhile snowflakes poured all over them and she kept rubbing the man's arms and legs and she herself nearly froze to death.
                "Go back to the house, Ruth" her husband cried, "you'll freeze to death."
                  But she clung to him wordlessly. Even as she massaged his arms and legs, her tears rolled down her cheeks, "I won't leave you. I won't leave you," she repeated.
                  Finally the US Mail car arrived. The mailman, who knew them well, helped them board the car and without stopping on his usual route, took the sick man and his wife to the nearest hospital.
                  Ruth stayed  in the hosp[ital with Fabia.
                  She slept in a corridor outside the patient's ward and in the daytime helped in scrubbing the floor and washing the dishes and cleaning the men's things. They didn't have enough money and Ruth was willing to work like a slave.
                "Ruth's a nice girl," said Fabia. "Like our own Filipino women."
                 Before nightfall, he took me back to the hotel. Ruth and Roger stood holding hands and smiling at me. From the inside of the room of the shanty, a low light flickered. I had a last glimpse of the apple trees in the orchard under the darkened sky as Fabia backed up the car. And soon we were on our way back to town. The dog started barking. We could hear it anymore, and all was darkness around us, except where the head lamps revealed a stretch of road leading somewhere.
                Fabia did not talk this time, I didn't seem to have anything to say myself. But when finally we came to the hotel and I got down, Fabia said, "Well I guess I won't  be seing you again."
                It was dimly lighted in front of the hotel and I could hardly see Fabia's face. Without getting out of the car, he moved to where I had sat, and I saw him extend his hand, I gripped it.
                "Tell Ruth and Roger," I said, "I love them."
                 He dropped my hand quickly. "They'll be waiting for me now," he said.
                "Look," I said, not knowing why I said it,"one of these days, very soon, I hope, I'll be going home. I could go to your town."
                "No," he said softly, sounding very much defeated but brave."Thanks a lot. But, you see, nobody would remember now."
                Then he started the car, and as it moved away, he waved his hand.
                "Goodbye," I said waving back in the darkness. And suddenly the night was cold like winter arraying early in these northern woodlands.
                 I hurried inside. There was a train next morning that left for Muncie, Indiana, at a quarter after eight.

                                                   *** end***

Task 1
1. Write the flaskbacks you encountered in the story here.





2. What is the importance of the flashback in the reading selection?





Task 3

What was created by Fabia inside Ruth?






Task 4
What is the relation of the scent  of apples to the accounts in the story?








                           
                 
              





 

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

                  Christopher Marlowe

        Come live with me, and be my love,
        And we will all the pleasures prove
        That hills and valleys, dales and fields, 
         And all the craggy mountains yields.

And we will sit upon the rocks, 
Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sings madrigals.


And I will make three beds of roses,
And a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle;


A gown made of the fines wool, 
Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs;
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.


The silver dishes for thy meat,
As precious as the gods do eat,
Shall on an ivory table be
Prepared each day for thee and me.


The Shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each may morning;
If these delights thy mind may move,
Then live with me, and be my love.


Meet the author...


       Christopher Marlowe (1564-1953)
Though not the first English poet to write in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter), Christopher Marlowe's brilliant use of it in his plays established blank verse as the preeminent meter for verse drama and ultimately for epic poetry in English. Marlowe is the author of one of the world's immortal tragedies, Dr. Faustus, as well as several other notable plays and poems.


       Born in Canterbury, Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker. He went  to Cambridge University on a scholarship usually awarded to students studying for the ministry.However, he spent much of his time writing plays and serving as a government agent. He never took holy orders. He is, indeed, reputed to have been an atheist, or at least to have held highly unorthodox religious views.


      While at Cambridge, Marlowe wrote Tamburlaine, the play that made the public aware of his dazzling abilities. It dramatizes thye exploits for a fourteenth-century Scythian shepherd who conquered much of the known world. As Marlowe portrays him, Tamburlaine personifies energy and ambition and is thus a character eminently suited for the dramatist's powerful blank verse. In the remaining siz years of his life, Marlowe write five more plays, including Dr. Faustus and a sequel to Tamburlaine. On May 30, 1593, he was killed by a dagger thrust in a tavern. His death may have been the result of a flight over the bill, or it may have been a political assassination.


       Marlowe's fame rests primarily on his plays, especially on his "mighty line," as Ben Jonson described his dramatic blank verse.Dr. Faustus has been a classic of dramatic literature for four hundred years. However, Marlowe's nondramatic poetry aline would be enough to secure him a permanent place in English Literature. His Hero and Leander is one of the finest narrative poems ever written in English, and  " The Passionate Shepherd to His Love" is one of the best known and most popular lyrics of the English Renaissance.


Task I
Find in the ff. options listed on the right side the word that best described by the following:


____________1. hollows, valleys                                         kirtle
____________2. songs with parts several voices with         prove
                            no musical accompaniment                       madrigals
____________3. bouquets                                                  posies
____________4. country youth                                           dales
____________5. shirt                                                          swains
____________6. experience


Task 2


What qualities in it might inspire someone to set the picture into music.


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Source:Insights IV, Englishworksheets pp.93-94.





 

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Christopher Marlowe


Come live with me, and

CHORAL READING

                               THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER SPEAKS
                                    BY TIMOTHY MULVEY

                        I am the Unknown Soldier. I was conceived and born under the blue skies. I grew. I loved life, knowing how good it could be. But I had a commission.

                        I was compelled to leave a plow in the province, to forget a rice field in the farm, to forsake a vineyard in the barrio. I went off to war.

                        But citizens, somewhere in the annals of casualty, I fell. The manner, the details of my death are not important. This only you should remember: when the science of war speaks from the infallible mouth of a bomb or gun, human fallible flesh shrinks and dies and in a dirty suit.

                       So I felt.
                       So I died.

                       But I have a new vantage point, citizens. My name now is not attached to local conscription. I am not Jew and Gentile; Filipino or Russian, French or Japanese; English German, or American. I am simply a casualty of war.

                      I will now say the harsh word, louder than the sound of all your revelry. My flesh is moldering in the earth. Will you remember that? My young flesh is moldering in the earth.Yet I do not say it with misgiving. I say it only for this new reason: life might have been kinder to me. I might have been spared a few years longer to know the joy of loving and of being loved. I might have been taken a child upon my knee and laughed (does it make much difference now) in the cool of the evening, or in the shadows of the night. But I was a casualty of war.

                   If I have done well, you may consign me to the small benedictions of village green and civic memorials. I will not reset it. If I have done wrong, if I have been the barbarian enemy who ran from a cave with the hot flame of death wrapped about my body, be kind, if not to my memory, at least to my orphaned children: for I was not a beast, but a man, blood-brother to man who flung the flame.

                  I am the Unknown Soldier. And since I am now of kindred spirits with all those who have spent their blood for cause, right or wrong, I know this: peace is not an armistice peace is not an end of hostilities; peace does mean the bending of peoples to yoke of the victor. Rather, peace means the return of all humanity to its common decency, to its self-respect.

                 My work is finished. Pray, now, that my soul will rest fell with HIM who once said: "Greater love than this no man hath, that man lay down his friends" and in the meantime, O you who still breathe under the sun, raise up the new family.

                Let the bond between you be stated so simply, that even a child might understand. Let the bond between you be love since love, citizens is not only a good neighbor policy it is the Law of the4 Prophets, If love is bond, love for all mankind, for all the tribes of the earth, there will be no need for violence. If love is not the bond, you shall reap the terrible fruit of your own planting. I am the Unknown Soldier of the most terrible conflict the earth has ever seen. I shall have died in vain if men cannot now, sit down as one family at a common table under the Fatherhood of God.

Oration

                              THE GREATEST WORK OF GOD'S HANDS
                                  John Henry Cardinal Newman

                        We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material
world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is elements, never-ceasing as are its changes, still it abides. It is bound togeteher by a law of permanence , it is set up in unity, and, though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. Change upon change -yet one change cries out to another, like the alternate Seraphim, in praise and in glory to their Maker. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of the night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return to triumph over tha grave, towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn over the blossoms of May, because they are to wither, but we know, withal, that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops-which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair. That which ought to come to naught, endures. That which promises a future, disaapointment and is no more. The same sun shines in heaven from first to last, and the blue firmament, the everlasting mountains, reflect his rays, but where is there upon earth the champion, the hero, the law-giver, the body politic, the sovereign race, which was great three hundred years ago, and is great now? Man rises to fall; he tends to dissolution from the moment he begins to be; he lives on indeed, in his children, he lives on in his name, he lives not on in his person. He is, as regards the manifestations of his nature here below, as a bubble that breaks, and as water poured upon the earth. He was young, he is old, he is never young again. This is the lament over him, poured forth in verse and prose, by Christians and by heathens. The greatest work of God's hands under the sun, he, in all the manifestations of his complex being, is born only to die.

North-West Is where the Sun Rises

                                  The first rays of the sun lightly gleamed on my cheeks. When I opened my eyes, I saw the orange sphere in its most beautiful glory as it ascends above the clouds. I looked outside the window and saw the world below as it received  the magnificent  warmth of the sun. I breathed deeply and smiled. Feeling the grumble of my stomache. I pressed on the orange button above me. A young lady came and smiled at me."Can I get you anything, Sir."

"Umm, When are you going to start serving breakfast?" "They're preparing them at this very moment, Sir. We can get yours right away if you want me to."

"Yes, please"
 
"I'll be right back with your breakfast, Sir."

As the stewardess turned away from me, I called her back, "Umm, Miss?"  "Yes, Sir"

I looked outside and said, It's a beautiful day, isn't it?" She smiled and said, " It certainly yes Sir. I personally love sunrises, that's partly the reason why I became a flight attendant." Then she walked away. I looked at my watch. I still had four hours to go before landing. Four hours before my feet would touch local ground. Four hours before inevitable change in my life would occur. Four hours to go...before I see her.

Her, I haven't seen her in ten years. Ten , long, agonizing years of studying and hard work, of sweat, blood and tears, of missing  her eyes, her smile, her face, lips, her warmth, her embrace.I can't wait to personally tell her how much I love her despite the distance, the pain, the doubts, the temptations, and the sleepless nights, I have finally earned enough money to go and get her and build a family with her. Once I get there, I'm going to ask for her hand in marriage.

I pulled out a small black box from my pocket and opened it. In it was the ring that I'd slip in her finger. It was the ring that symbolizes the never-ending love, trust, fidelity and promise to her, that I will be hers forever...if she only chose to accept.

Before I knew it, It was time for me to go down from the plane. All I thought about was her that I didn't know how I got out of the airport with all my bags, I was there, looking for a taxi. When amidst the crowd, a beautiful lady with long, straight hair and a smile I've always known was looking at me from a far. I walked towards her, bringing my two huge bags with me.

"Hello, Bill," she said . Her voice was music to my ears. I knew I had to do it right then and there. I slowly knelt on one knee and showed her the ring.

"Marry me , Zhengzhou."

                I heard everyone around us applaud loudly. I then stood up and Zhengzhou embraced me. It was the embrace that I 'm waiting for ten years. It was the warmth that I, longed and wanted and missed and didn't feel for a long time... not fascinated, not dreamed but its real, really its real.

"Yes, Bill, I will marry you."

We were both in tears when I slipped the ring on her finger. Then she held my hand and took the smaller bag.

"C'mon,Let's go home."

"You need to see her now , taxi is waiting." I was unconscious, I close my eyes and open again... and tears in my eyes. Why? what happened? Tell me what happened to her! God knows I was with her, always with her, talking to her despite the distance... but why? " Zarah tapped my shoulder and took my hand. "C'mon it's time to go, We need to see her for the last time."

I was there on that old dilapidated house I saw a white coffin... "No...no please no.. not this time after all those years, I can't bear this! C'mon, Zhengzhou wake up! get out from that coffin.. I need you! I am here for you! Why leave me?All was turned into nothing, my efforts, our promises, what will happened to me now? ...Hours, minutes, seconds had past I was still unconcious looking at her face, and up there praying...asking him why?...why?... please give her back to me, not now, not this time.

"Sir, Sir, wake up! were here now in Manila Airport, you're dreaming Sir." "Umm, Oh thank God its only a dream.. what a bad dream!

"Daddy, Daddy", my son and my wife waving her hand, her smile.. ohh ,  "Zhengzhou my wife.Thank you Allah!it's only a dream.. only a bad dream."

I held my son in my arms and embraces my wife.

C'mon let's go home.

Kites and Planes

              It was a great day to stroll in the park and watch how people spend their idle time. Families arrived with picnic baskets. Kids played Frisbee with their dogs. Couples walked hand-in-hand, sat under the tree and kissed like there was no one there. Other kids  were on top of a hill, flying their kites of different shapes, colors and sizes. They soared high up in the sky like exotic birds gliding beneath the afternoon skies. I was fortunate enough to have my own tree, free of kissing couples, I sat on one of the branches that almost touched the ground,  while Bill laid a small towel on one of the roots and rested his head on it.


               "I wonder if kites get tangled with airplane wings".


                Bill looked at me with those what-the-heck-are-you-thinking eyes. "Whatever,"he said.
"No really ," I said, "Maybe if I held on tight to the kite and it got tangled on one of the plane's wings, I could go places."


"Jasmine," he said as he sat up straight, "trust me, I don't want that to happen."


I didn't bother to ask him why , because I knew he's going to give me a comeback. And I wasn't in the mood to hurt anybody at that time, so I let him be, Besides, I was busy dreaming...


"Maybe when I get used at hanging on to the plane's wings, I'll also get used to flying. Maybe I wouldn't need that kite anymore. I'm going to learn to fly, Fly far away from here." Would that be happened? A thousand words and questions maybe not anymore.


I heard Bill whisper something like, "No way," I just rolled my eyes. He should get used to me thinking out loud,


"Or maybe you could help me,"


"What? Me?" he said, "How?"


"I'm gonna make a kite, and I'll be the stick that would hold it together. Then you're gonna pull me when the wind is strong. Then you could snip the rope so I could fly away."


I sat beside him and said, "Wouldn't that be nice, Bill? I've always wanted to fly." Escape from the cage i was in ....but how?


"I don't want you to do that." he said. I was surprised with what he said. He has always supported me on everything that I dreamed of. This was the first time he said no to me.


"Bill, you said before that whatever I do-"


"Screw what I said before, I just don't want you to leave me, Ever.Is that clear? Call me possessive , but I don't want you to leave me here, alone. I don't wanna be alone anymore, that's all."


His cheeks turned red, "But, Jasmine, if you really want to fly away on a kite, then I guess I'll just miss you."


I squeezed his hand, He looked at me, I smiled, pulled him close, and made him lie down on my lap. "I'm not gonna leave you, never."