The 7th

Prologue

Truly extraordinary things happen in the most ordinary of ways to the most ordinary of people. Through a sunny day or a child's game, stepping through a wardrobe or being whisked away by a storm. So many great adventures started in such ways as to set them in an ordinary world. Such is my story. When I was younger I could walk on air. Not ordinary at all and I know that to most people who are reading this that statement sounds completely invalid and somewhat insane, but, there are a select few of you that are reading this and going "You too. Yea?" Then this story is for you. That is not to say, however, that if you have never experienced this walking on air phenomenon that you cannot enjoy this story. In fact, quite the contrary. I believe you will find this story just as intriguing, if not more so, as those who have experienced it. This is for those rare individuals who shared in that experience with me. I know that those who know first-hand what I am talking about will need no persuading to continue reading and that is why I say this is for them.

When I was younger I could walk on air. A simple statement if, like most people, you write it off as the misunderstood and misguided fantasies of a child. Let's not forget here that the fantasies of a child have inspired many of the greatest achievements of adults. I am here to tell you this is no fantasy.

I can remember it in vivid detail. My family and I lived in a double wide trailer in a small town in rural south Alabama called Home. Yea, I know. First the walking on air thing and now a town named Home. I promise its true, look it up if you don't believe me. The trailer was settled in front of a large field planted with corn or cotton or peanuts or whatever other crop was in rotation for that season. Just a hundred or so yards up the road was my grandmother and grandfathers house who I had always referred lovingly to as MawMaw and PawPaw. All year long, no matter the weather, these great green pine trees filled the path between their house and ours. It was always amazing to me as a child that these trees seemed to endure whatever the world threw at them. Always green and always tall even through the worst of the hurricane winds and freezing cold rains.

Our double wide was really nothing special or it wasn't to anyone that wasn't me. Its brown color had been worn down and faded from its years of abuse by our constantly changing weather. The interior was much the same due to another constantly changing and growing force of destruction, my brother and myself. We were hell on everything we could get our hands on. Not intentionally mind you, hell on everything the way boys can be in that "oops I accidentally flipped the couch over by tackling my brother into it even though mom said to not to" or "the crap I broke the window with a baseball by throwing it in the house but it was really Keah's fault for not hitting the ball when I threw it" kind of way. The thin carpet on the floor barely gave any protection from the floor boards beneath it. When the wind blew the slightest the walls and roof would moan and pop from the strain but it, like those trees, endured pretty much anything the world threw at. The furniture matched the trailer, well-worn and outdated, and was decorated with pictures of flowers, wagon wheels, and milk churns all in subdued hues of browns and oranges. An old rectangular shaped coffee table set in the middle of the floor about five feet in front of our old television. When I say old I mean this was the type of TV that had no remote and a turn dial to pick up the five or six stations we could get on our big aluminum antenna that towered above everything in our yard. To anyone else these things may have seemed dull and drab but not to my brother and me.

Heck no. To us this trailer was a castle standing hundreds of feet tall with stone lining the walls to the very top. The vents in the floor were not vents at all, they were in fact murder holes cut into our castle to allow us to fire our cannons (straws with uncooked peas for ammunition) at the incoming enemies (rats, roaches, flies etc.). The couch would quickly become a truck over which would fight about who was going to drive and who had to ride in the back and keep off the Indians, a.k.a, our dog Lady.