or directly from 
The drowning of my town had been exciting and horrifying. Tales circulated among the early-grade-school set about old people who would refuse to leave and pets that would not accept their new homes and insist on staying in the town even though the waters would drown them as surely as it would take their homes.
Such tales were, of course, unfounded, and by the time the slowly rising waters inundated the site, nothing was left but streets, sidewalks, and the ghosts of gardens.
But the fears of the first-graders were perpetuated that year, marked by the death of Albert Fugate. Albert was a copper-haired second-grader, a big boy to us. That same spring he died of complications from measles, and at least to my seven-year-old mind, Albert was inextricably linked to the death of my town as I had known it.
Even though Albert was properly laid to rest in Summit’s Memorial Gardens Cemetery, full of new graves, with Arcadia’s old caskets and headstones, to me he still lived in the engulfed town.
I imagined I could see him, riding his red bicycle furiously down the sidewalks, unimpeded by the surrounding waters. He would stop to rest under the branches of the apple tree beside our fence, his alert eyes keeping eternal watch over the premises.
While the Corps of Engineers carefully relocated all of the human sites and signs, the natural things were purposely left.
The trees, nine-tenths underwater, disturbed me. Their branches seemed like woody fingers, clawing at the sky in a vain attempt at rescue.
“Fish habitat,” my father had patiently explained. He told me that tree branches in the water made a secure home for fish to live in, just as they did in the air for birds. This I could understand, since the apple tree in our garden had been a place of escape and reverie.
Now as I stared down from the warm white light at Barry and the frantic ministration of the men on the beach, I felt the same security I had once had sitting in the apple tree staring down at Dad.
©2008, Janet Taliaferro
A Sky for Arcadia (Chapter One) – Part 5
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