One of the only images I was able to recall was this dirty soggy mattress, squeezed in along the side of my moms old house. My sisters and I had to hose it off, there were tiny bugs crawling all over it, I used a white plastic tool in attempt to keep the crawling bugs off me.
Everything was drippy and wet cement and yard smell.
Once the mattress was de-bugged the idea was to get in in the car, on the ferry, to then move it into a room. One of us would have a new bed.
Behind me was the backyard, all cement with a half empty green swimming pool. Perhaps we fished the mattress out of there. Across the surface of the pool grew those little wiggly tad pools. The blue slide still stood there with its aluminum ladder bolted in the cement and the sun faded tongue dropping off into the deep end.
Squeezed into the rectangle space along with our bodies, the drippy mattress with the bug waterfall, were slabs and slabs of sod that desperately needed to be planted and watered in the new yard.
People kept coming and going, it was hard to find help to get that drenched mattress moved though the scraping walled space along the side of the stucco house.
I remember feeling exhausted after the mattress was loaded up and ready to go, but we couldn't afford not to go back and get all the green slices of grass. The ferry trip across was too far, and to go and come back, they would have all turned brown and useless.
My older sister and I were directing our little sisters, trying to get them to help us.
My hands were cold and I knew baby kittens crawled around inside the garage.
I don't know where my mom was, maybe waiting across the water, for the bed and the front yard to arrive.
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