And the rains came....

When I was a child, we lived on the island of Okinawa, now part of Japan. Our house was made of cinder block, and windows circled the whole place. Lush vegetation surrounded it and in the back, behind a wire fence, were Okinawan tombs, cut into the hillside. Outside, the tombs, stone structures pretended to be entries to homes, the tombs that held an ancestors’ bones. My bedroom windows oversaw them and the family rituals they required. Families would picnic outside the tombs on holidays, and cleaning the bones housed inside was a tradition.

As an elementary child, I had a vivid imagination and was, by third grade, writing short stories and illustrating them. But the nightmares the tombs caused were beyond my ability to process them into words on paper. I can still remember shivering in fear after waking myself up after one of them. Okinawa had a violent history. We children were warned to keep away from any bombs or ordinance we might find while playing outside. They were a regular occurrence. I envisioned the bodies of native people, blown sky-high by a US grenade, filling the backyard tombs. As I said, I was a child with a vivid imagination.

Today, as I drove slowly through an avalanche of rain that reminded me of the typhoons that regularly whipped through Okinawa, I was transported back to that tiny island. All the memories from sixy-five years ago came rushing back. Even though I was safe in my big American SUV, I felt the flickers of those nightmares threatening to return. Their shadow has clung to me throughout the day.