Now and Then

He sat at the park looking at the Crape Myrtle trees in bloom. The vivid red flowers hung like grapes on the vine; their color complementing the green of the trees' leaves. Spring in North Texas was his favorite time of the year. As a child growing up in a ghetto neighborhood, there were no trees like this. With dingy buildings, iron fences and asphalt streets, the only brilliant color there had been from graffiti paintings on concrete walls by urban artists--or unregulated vandals, depending on your point of view. There were no vibrant trees there such as he enjoyed on this day in his adopted home state. No matter, though, how far he had come and how different his life was now, there was always an invisible ligament connecting his self now to that boy then. Nothing could ever break that tie.



Word Beads is a weekly writing meme. The challenge is to string the week's five chosen "words below with other words of your choosing to fashion a sentence, several sentences, a paragraph, several paragraphs, a poem, or even a short story."

This week's words were:

Steal
Ghetto
Myrtle
Unregulated
Ligament

9 down, 21 to go