Atomic Bomb
Written:
September 30, 2017
Oh Lord don’t let them drop that Atomic Bomb on Me!
SPRING, WHEN ALL IS RIGHT WITH THE WORLD
by Alicia Hugg
Ah spring, the season when all of our fancies lightly turn to thoughts of love and rebirth.
This spring generous rains have greened the grasses and encouraged their lush growth along the gentle slopes of our foothills. The wildflowers are back, lending an air of ageless beauty to our country roads. Fruit orchards bring forth delicate petals that float gently to the ground, covering it like lace.
With the abundance of water comes the promise of bountiful crops to sustain the appetites of a nation hoping to overcome the impact of an economic recession the likes of which has not been seen since the days of the Great Depression.
My mother used to talk about that Depression, the hard times she had feeding a family of six. One soup bone, she’d say, would make a kettle of soup to fill the empty bellies of her entire brood. People who survived that era endured the gnawing fear that such a time might return. They stockpiled food and other necessities to guard against the threat of having nothing.
Those of us who arrived at wartime carry another kind of weight inside, a weight borne of the fear of destruction by nuclear bombs.
As a small child growing up in the Watts section of Los Angeles in the 1940s, I cringed in terror underneath my grandmother’s solid mahogany dining room table during the many blackouts we had then. The idea was that with the city in darkness, the enemy wouldn’t know where to drop those horrible bombs. Thick blankets covered our windows during those air raids; blue light bulbs replaced our regular lighting, adding an even greater sense of the macabre to that point of my existence.
“But gramma, I don’t want to die!” I’d plead, my heart pounding wildly against my chest.
“Hush child,” came my grandmother’s reply, her ever-stoic demeanor seemingly unruffled by events around her.
A few years later, after moving to the Central Valley city of Stockton, the fear of the bomb continued to menace my childhood. There were bomb drills at our elementary school. We practiced hiding under our desks and shielding our heads with our arms—as if this effort could protect us against an enemy bombing. Those who were financially able invested in bomb shelters. We envisioned the day when the bright flash would consume our horizons and the ensuing radiation melt the flesh from our bones. No more springs, only a dry desolate land with few survivors of the holocaust to come.
Flash foreward. How silly all of that behavior seems in the wake of technology that made hydrogen bombs obsolete and bomb shelters one of history’s greatest white elephants. Today’s reality is that there will be no white flashes.
So now we relish our springs, taking heart in the continuing miracle of life’s cycles: the sweet clean scent of a newborn babe; the look of awe in the innocent eyes of a toddler as she marvels at the struggle of a chick to free itself from the protective shell that has ensured its beginnings; the child in the schoolyard, enjoying a recess from the rigors of reading, writing and ‘rithmetic.
We are buoyed by the signs around us that love continues to spring eternal, as we observe young lovers caught in the throes of courtship.
