subject: A Striplight To Remember [print this page] My sister is now my best friend but it wasn't always that way. We had our up and downs as children. We fought over toys when we were young and boys and make up as we got older. But I suppose we always knew that we had each other to depend on which was the most important thing.
We came from a relatively poor family and did not have the things that most children did. Our home was not filled with the finer things in life and our furniture was torn and tattered. And one thing I always remembered was the striplight that was in our kitchen. It made humming noise that would become a sound I never actually realised would offer me the strangest of consolation. A comforting sound.
It would flicker for ages every time you turned it on and sometimes me and my sister would try and guess the number of seconds it would take to actually come on. We would stand there and count out loud as we watched the striplight with interest. As a children we seemed to be able to make a game out of anything and when you had as little as we did even a striplight could offer entertainment.
I remember one Christmas, my mother must have saved like mad that year, because to our surprise on Christmas morning we found a playstation under the tree. Along with it she had purchased a game that came with a dance mat. We played all day on that dance mat and eventually my mother had enough and asked us to take it up to our bedroom so she could find some peace.
My sister and I went up to our room still filled with excitement and joy over this most wonderful gift. We carefully cleared a space to lay out the dancemat and carefully hooked up the playstation to our tv. We had decided to have a competition to see who could do the fastest song. As we worked through each piece of music our moves got fiercer and more focused. We suddenly heard a crash and the shouting of our mother.
When we went downstairs we found the striplight had fallen from the ceiling. In our excitement we had jumped so hard we had actually knocked from the ceiling. We both stood there looking at our mother and waiting for her to say something. To our surprise she looked over and said...thank goodness for that, I never did like that light. With a sense of relief and some laughter we picked up the pieces of the broken striplight and carried on with our day of celebration.
The striplight was replaced but this time in its place was a fancy new series of lights connected by what appeared to be a long wire. I suppose it was supposed to be modern, but in a way I kind of missed that old striplight. The calming hum and the games my sister and I would play. It funny how the simplest of things can have such an effect.
by: Andy Ball
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