This Book is Dedicated to:

The Lost, the Orphaned, the Abandoned, & the Adopted…

The Kinderheim

The Road to Fear

Kinderheim in German means a children’s home. A home for kids basically.

As well, it serves a respite for persons of means with adequate wealth to briefly forgive the responsibility of parenting and lend their sons and daughters to the custody of women clothed as nuns. Protestant or what not, nun-like nevertheless. Taskmaster would be a polite description regarding the earnestness with which their will is applied.

I’m not sure what they were really- always thought them as nuns- but seeing as how it was a protestant based proposition, I have to assume I can’t call them “Sisters” even though I felt as if they were. Somehow religion was the fundamental basis on which they placed their principals regarding spanking us as kids, and getting us up to speed when it came to bible verses.

I sang. God knows I sang. Put it down to verse- and smiled as much as I could to avoid the beatings and spankings that were to sure to occur for whatever godforsaken reason no child will ever understand. We were little soldiers ready to happen. Small projects for the future army.

We went out a few times. Always guarded by our nuns. Usually to unimaginably beautiful apple orchards, and just very enchanting walks through valleys of trees and an occasional side road of rocks and melt. Magnificent is how my heart beat at the newness of it all, and the rush of vapor from the clouds as they met our fearless intrepid troop of tiny soldiers and passed us by for better spoils.

And there were roads. In a rugged blue sky with clouds that suggested an unknown wrath, laughing at us as we passed through the orchards that led to castles which to me were large rocks, with large steps, that took us up to meet the sky, and then look down at what was below, and taste fear for the first time.

In a kids memory, there are a lot of blanks. Adventures start- and don’t end, or they end with no start. Some just have a middle.

That is where I found myself, running down the top of a winding road, in the middle of a dark forest, where the only light was on the road itself, and you had this scary feeling of trying to catch up to the rest of the pack somewhere so far away you can’t see them.

I knew they were below- and I was way behind them somewhere at the bottom of the forest road.

If there was ever an alien encounter story, this would be one of them. Totally lost, big black forest on both sides, the only sunlight is milked on the road in mid day, and the road has so many curves and twists you don’t know how far behind you are.

Easy prey. I was too scared to be paralyzed. I just ran. Ran hard. Through a lot of winding and twisting turns on white and dark splotches left as a taste from the black forest trees tall enough to leave suggestive patches of shadows and whispery stuff to make you run like a deer- to the next painting of sunlight.

Well I survived. But I never did remember the ending.