LIBRARY PROSE Writers' reflections

Some samples from writers who participated in last year's East Palestine library prose program.
FROM "BRIDGES," BY AGNES MARTINKO OF YOUNGSTOWN.
As a little girl, not quite three, I watched from an upstairs window that September in 1935 as my mother's body in a big shiny box was carried from the house. Cars parked all over the front yard and surrounding hay field started their engines and followed the hearse out the country lane one by one. Every car was black back then, just like the hearse. Their flat, rectangular tops bobbed up and down over the uneven terrain weaving their way to the paved road that would take her across the Mahoning Avenue bridge to rest at Calvary Cemetery.
... I did not go along to see her placed in the ground that day, but, later, my father would take me almost every Sunday to the place where she lay. He would cry and we would both kneel on the damp ground and pray. On the way home, he would stop at the big Isaly plant at the end of the bridge to buy ice cream cones that seemed nearly as tall as the plant's central tower.
My father [crossed the Center Street bridge] working at Republic gas station that had words in peeling paint on the side that said, "Bring them in dead, Take them out alive." Elements of a Frankenstein movie would churn around in my mind as I tried to imagine what could go on in such a weird place. If a nice clean hospital couldn't bring people back to life, how could garage men in this dirty old shack do it? And, if they really could do it, why didn't somebody bring my mother here so I could have a mother that cared for me like all the other kids at school? I struggled with that dilemma for years before I realized it was car batteries and not people that were being raised from the dead.
FROM "A LOVE NEVER ENDING," BY DARLENE TORDAY OF BERLIN CENTER
"Are you comfortable? Do you need anything?" Henry asked, picking up his hat. "I'm going to water your roses now, Missy," he told her, before leaving her alone on the porch.
Missy sat silently locked in a world of her own, her left hand clenched in a fist, useless on her lap. Her mouth was twisted on the left side, a little drool flowing from the corner.
Henry lovingly watered the roses Missy had planted so many years ago, his glance going often to the porch. He saw her looking out the window and wondered if she knew how much he loved her, how much he wished things were different.
Putting away the hose, Henry stopped at Missy's favorite rose. He trimmed away the dead ones, then finding a perfect bloom, clipped it before carrying it inside.
Bowing from the waist, he presented it to Missy. "To the most beautiful girl I know." He waited.
Just as he was turning to go, Missy lifted her right hand, taking the rose. She sniffed. Her eyes met his for a minute, before glancing away lost again in her own world.
FROM "WHAT GOES AROUND, STAYS AROUND," BY LORETTA GRIFFIN OF MONACA, PA.
Your whole perspective on life changes when you retire. For our retirement gift to each other, we took a trip across the northern part of Pennsylvania to enjoy all the wonderful sights the Pennsylvania mountains has to offer in the fall. We returned to western Pennsylvania via the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
We stopped at a restaurant for lunch along the way, and when I returned from the salad bar, I found that John had struck up a conversation with an elderly gentleman at the next table, which was out of character for him.
He said, "I like talking to old people now, now that I 'are' one." Oh golly! He has slipped from a mature gentleman to elderly right before my eyes and it's only been seven days since retirement.
As for me, I won't consider myself old until I have seen everything I wanted to see and done everything I wanted to do and I know this will never happen because I have a list and I keep adding to it.
I have come up with a criteria for young women to help them find the perfect husband who should last them a lifetime and it is as follows.
The true test of a Panama hat's mettle before it is blocked is whether you can roll it up tightly enough to thread through a wedding ring. And I say, it's time we started rolling up our men and thrusting them through a wedding ring. If they slide through, marry them.
Source: East Palestine Memorial Public Library