From My Childhood Balcony by Lena Solomon

From the height of the second-floor balcony, my dad hung every year a few flowerpots to cover the building’s missing chunks of plaster and bricks, eaten away over time by weather and earthquakes. The children living on my street were mostly boys, and sometimes, I felt too shy to go downstairs and play with them. In those days, I collected songs, playful words and other thoughts, and let them drift down on a slow dance, the way the wind carried the leaves of the tall poplar tree next to my window. From my balcony, I watched my mind’s reflections reach the ground and bounce, like little balls, on the hopscotch we drew with white chalk on the dark pavement.

            On hot summer evenings, I watched from up there as the crepuscule flowed down the street, veiling the children, the man walking the brown dog with floppy ears, and the pretty pregnant woman coming back from work. She rented the house at number 14 with a huge cherry tree in the garden. She was as kind as she was pretty and allowed us, children living on the street, to climb the tree to pick cherries.

From the height of the second row of branches, I sometimes caught sight of her watching us. She seemed as sad as everyone else in that part of the world at that time. Perhaps because she was scared. Perhaps she thought about how could her baby, innocent, helpless survive this world. I imagined her praying to God, or whatever she believed in, to protect her baby and her family from the ears of the communist secret service. They could easily kidnap her husband and send him to forced labour. Like so many others. I imagined her wondering as I did, at the mystery of birth, of creating a human in nature’s oven and then sentencing her to live in this sad, scary world.

*

During those hot summer evenings, I liked to stretch my arm out towards the sky.

From my balcony on the second floor, I could almost touch the colourful masterpiece Sun’s

brother, Sunset was unfolding in front of me. Before night’s radiant Queen erased Sunset’s

work of art, the colours seemed to compete for supremacy of boldness. The red, the pink, the

yellow, the orange, the purple, all became more intense as the blue background darkened.

Most of the time, it was the red that overpowered the others. It looked like Sky’s wide-

open mouth exposed its endless throat, and the force of a mysterious whirlwind was about to

swallow me. Behind my closed eyes, I slid towards the vastness of the deep, fascinating

unknown.

*

The house across the street was fringed with roses, green iron fence separated the street full of noisy children from the quiet misery of the girl living behind the grid. The blinds on her windows stopped the daylight from entering her room. I wished she would make up stories of rebellion and adventures in the dark. Sometimes, the roses threw a heavy shroud of perfume over the whole street, as if trying to make the children notice and remember that there, behind the blinds, lived a lonely girl who would love to come out and play with us. I pictured the roses feeling a compassionate heartache for her.

I was the only one her father allowed to visit her. I didn’t judge him. I thought perhaps like everyone else, he was afraid too. After the war, the communists threatened him because he had been educated abroad, in the West.  He was a doctor and feared that someone could fabricate a story and denounce him. No one cared whether a reported story was real or not, and they could strip him of his profession and job, make him disappear and send him, like many others, to forced labour.

Some days I approached the locked gates of her front yard, and the lonely girl let me in.

She confessed that she secretly planted a lilac bush in her backyard. One more friend, she said I can talk to the roses and having the lilac too, I can fit a secret thought inside each little flower and no one will find out.

She always seemed sad, her eyes were talking of loneliness, and the roses quietly bent their heads to acknowledge her sentiment. When the evening started throwing its dark, transparent veil over the world, she would disappear into the house, and the lights would go out. There were no streetlights at night. The city looked as if under siege, and the fence separating the street from the sad, lonely girl looked black in the dark.

During the days when there was no school, and our thoughts could run free, without

being spotted by the secret service, I watched the girl across the street carry books to her

backyard. She confessed that she liked to read, to learn as much as she could about the world outside. The roses above the grid of her prison courtyard were not telling everything they saw on the other side of the grid she said. I can speak to the roses, you know! They say they like listening to music, Bach, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, but they know more, much more, which they are not telling me…

An elderly lady, always wearing an apron over her clothes, was also living in that house.

She was dressed and looked like Shakespeare’s Juliet’s Nurse in the movie. Every morning around seven o’clock she ran to buy bread, because bread was often not available after 8 am. She never smiled, and no one on the street knew her name. Like everybody else, she seemed scared and sad.

The lonely girl across the street never smiled. She thought a smile was either a way to hide a lie or a way to experience something that fills your heart with happiness. I cannot lie she said. And I cannot feel anything other than sorrow, as if something heavy were pressing on my chest, perhaps coming from a time I do not remember. My grandparents and uncles were killed in the war, or by the communists later. My parents don’t talk about it, so I can’t be sure. They were doctors, you see, so they tried to understand why there is evil in the world and cure it. They believed that passion defeats fears and dreams may overrule world’s ugliness. But I learnt that passion does not make you invulnerable.

She tried, as I did, to understand the unspeakable truth about which we could talk to no one. I wished that in the silence of lightless nights, the roses would smile, or even laugh to teach her innocent sentiments of lightness. I wished that one day, true, happy laughter would

overtake the street, and flood her and me, and all the children with avid hope, longing for the future. I wished that one day no one would try to break our dreams coming from the deepest wells of passions, where desires and hopes become one.

Romanian-born Lena Solomon is a clinical psychologist and a neuropsychologist by profession, having practiced in 3 continents. She also holds a degree in general linguistics.  She is passionate about writing and music. She writes poetry, children's stories, plays, and short stories. Her literary work is inspired by the lives she touched, by the fantastic reality of dreams and by her perception of the complexity of the human condition, with its humorous and harsh aspects. “October” a poetry book and “ Ariya's Odyssey” a children’s book are two of her published works. She also published a children’s book of poetry. Some of her poems and stories appeared in Of The Book Press, Verse Afire Poetry Magazine, Dark Winter LitMagazine (May, June 2026). She also presented at professional conferences and published in professional journals. She is a member of the Ontario Poetry Society and has recently received a prize in a competition for one of her poems.