Free 34 Seconds by Stella Samuel

into an eerie place full of ghosts and unspoken history. We left after a quick lunch and a trip into the candy store for salt water taffy and headed back to Deltaville. Our life was back to normal; we were on a family vacation. I was feeling a bit more settled. Though with each new look around, I’d see more change. A house a friend from school lived in while growing up was now an insurance office; a tiny grocery store that had been around since the early 1900s had burned to the ground; and there was still a burnt wood pile on the ground. Back at the house, the walls in my father’s home hadn’t been painted in many years. The carpet needed to be replaced. Nana had a huge pile of ants living in her family room, and no one seemed to notice until I saw them crawling around and followed their trail. Things seem to be aging because time moves on and because people don’t have the time they once had to fix things as they break. It was very hard for me to get past. I loved the trees in Daddy’s yard. They were beautiful. Back home in Colorado, I took photos all the time of huge hardwood trees that had been standing tall for more than a hundred years. I was always making up stories surrounding the unknown history of an old tree. I usually guessed where property lines were many years ago before Denver took off; back when it was farmland and one family owned and farmed the land for miles, or at least until the next big tree line. Back in Colorado it was fun to imagine the history of old trees, and I had so much fun looking into the life and history of them. But back in Virginia, I knew the history of the trees, and it made me feel incredibly sad for some reason.
    Sunday came quickly. We had to be at the beach for the wedding at one o’clock. I decided to take the kids with us to the wedding. It’s hard to tell a child they will miss an opportunity to play on a beach on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Especially if those children are used to flat lands and “play sand” in the middle of the country nowhere near a beach. I figured if they became unruly, Chris could always take them for a walk down the beach, and they could skip rocks into the York River. It took us about forty five minutes to get to the beach, after the two hours at Dad’s house getting the girls dressed and ready to leave the house. It took about twenty minutes to locate Emily’s favorite stuffed bunny she had named Goon Goon . We got the bunny for her when she was four months old at her pediatrician’s recommendation. She had not been sleeping through the night. She was awake about six times a night wanting me to nurse her each time she awoke, so we got her something to hug and hold throughout the night. The idea, of course, was she would wake up, find her bunny friend in the crib with her, and the warmth and comfort her bunny friend offered would help her drift back to sleep. What really happened was she would find her bunny friend in her crib, hold it up in the air, and scream until I came into the room to get her. Then I’d have to nurse and rock baby Emily while trying to keep the bunny from falling away from her little body. I learned several tricks to catch the bunny or grab the fallen bunny with my feet and bring it back to where she lay against my breast. For almost two years, we just called the little pink thing Bunny. When Emily was a little over two years old, she started calling him Goon Goon. When Emily turned three; Goon Goon went through the change and became a girl bunny. Chris and I still called it he, every so often, and Emily was always there to correct us. Goon Goon went everywhere with us. And we were lucky she made it everywhere. She was under the bathroom sink lying under a towel. When we finally found her, I was very close to telling Emily Goon Goon would have to stay at Pop-Pop’s house while we went to the beach wedding, but Chris lucked out and just happened to look in the cabinet. As soon as he found her, Emily came running out