The Cast Iron Patio Set 1974

<p>In 1974 on the quiet ridges of Griffith Creek Mountain in Whitwell Tennessee a seven-year-old boy wakes each morning with a heart older than his years. His memories-too heavy for such small shoulders-are filled with sorrow he has never learned to name. He tries in his own innocent way to hide it. To control it. To keep it from spilling out where anyone can see.</p><p>Each morning he boards a school bus he despises. Not because of school but because the ride steals him away from the two people he cannot bear to leave-his mother and his sister Lucy. Especially Lucy. Thirty minutes feels like thirty miles and thirty miles feels like forever when you are seven and afraid of losing what little you have left.</p><p>Years earlier change came unexpectedly violently shattering the fragile world he trusted. Now even as a child he lives with the constant fear that he could come home and find everything different again just as it was before. Fear lives where comfort should be whispering that nothing good lasts that love can disappear without warning.</p><p>Money is scarce. Seven-sometimes nine-family members pack themselves into a small two-bedroom house sharing floor space and blankets but never enough certainty. Poverty presses against every wall yet it is not what weighs heaviest on the boy's heart. What hurts most is the fear of losing the love he does have the people who make him feel safe in a world that too often has not.</p><p>He tells himself those hard years are gone that the grief should not still haunt him. But grief is stubborn. It settles deep especially in children who don't know how to let it go. So he carries it silently tightly teaching himself never to show too much never to cry too loudly never to need more than others think a boy should.</p><p>He wants nothing more than to be what he is-a little boy. A brother. A son. Someone who can spend long days with his family fishing in the creek or running barefoot through the mountain grass. But the darkness that once touched his life trails behind him even as he walks with the outrageously kind heart only a wounded child can have.</p><p>Still he tries each day to lift his chin breathe deep and believe he is loved and cared for. Because he is. Beneath all the fear beneath all the grief is a spirit that refuses to crumble.</p><p>So what becomes of a kind-hearted boy forced to hide what he feels in his hope for love and happiness?</p>