Rich Brunner

Aliene Rich Brunner

It's a normal morning for this elderly woman as she lies in bed wondering what was going to motivate her to get out of bed on this most ordinary day. With some difficulty, she rises, gets dressed and heads for the kitchen to make coffee and read the paper - the two staples of her morning routine. And then the unthinkable happens: she falls. Hard. In the aftermath of the accident, drifting in and out of consciousness, she is visited by the sometimes beautiful but often haunting images from her past - she talks to her mother, argues with her brothers, jokes with her husband, laughing and crying through a steady stream of friends and relations, all long-since gone from this world. She once again lives through "Black Sunday" - the Great Dust Storm of 1935; the death of her mother at the age of thirty-three; the torture of being separated from her young siblings. And in an outer-bodied experience, she soars back through her past, able to observe her most distant relatives as they go about their lives. Suddenly time doesn't have the same meaning it once did. As she tries to navigate through these alternating realities she relives the most pivotal moments of her life, questions every decision she ever made, and eventually comes to accept a new level of grace and forgiveness.