Yore Days (Excerpt One)

They say a person's eyes are the windows to their soul. My mother's eyes used to be the color of the sea, vigorously alive with their sparks of green, gray, and those marine blue streaks. Now, they are simply gray, giving one the perception that her soul is battered and tired, much like the abandoned dinghies along the shore outside my home in Magnolia, Massachusetts.
Kodie Glouster, I am known as and I find it rather ironic given that my last name is pronounced the same as the vacation spot for Bostonians, Gloucester (a few minutes north of Magnolia). It is not, in fact, pronounced as "chester" or "cester". For a time, that was uncanny and incomprehensible to my mother who insisted in pronouncing it glawh-seh-ster. Mind you, that phonetic translation is probably incorrect.
My mother, Coral, was, as a young woman, a natural and pure beauty. Her name seemed to reflect her look and heart as though she were the sister of a goddess born from the ocean, perhaps Aphrodite. It was predestined that the sailors of Uncle Sam's navy would fall for her. They clamored for her affections and treasured as much as a moment of her attention. She was the ocean in human form--sometimes pacific and other times, outraged and invulnerable, yet always possessing that magnificent feminine beauty and majesty.

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