The smallest moments, objects, and feelings can start beautiful stories. This was my moment.
This is it. This is the picture of the lamp that started it all.
To explain it better, I need to start like this: in the postwar period, my parents had to adapt to life after losing everything. But in all that misfortune, we were fortunate enough that none of us lost our lives. We also lived for a couple of years in the house on top of the hill (with relatives), above the beautiful, Austria-like city called Samobor. The best part of it? Winters. Many white Christmases, tons of snow, squirrels running along the electrical cables from one tall pine tree to another, the quiet of snowflakes, and those little floor lamps that lit up the staircase to the house. Now, all of this happened in my early childhood and into my teenage years, yet those memories, smells, little moments, and weird-shaped lamps stuck with me well into my later life, when I started the story 10 years ago. Did hot, humid Florida days make me yearn for snow? I don’t know. I just know that one day, the story was there, inside my head—stuck in half Croatian, half English—and I HAD to get it out.
And I did.
It was the most wonderful, fulfilling sensation, having to write those two little words: “the end.”
And it all started with memories of winter, in the middle of Florida’s hurricane season.
