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How I Learned the Meaning of Infamy

A spider made me think of the attack on Pearl Harbor today

5 min readDec 9, 2023
A giant black and white spider and an silhouette of a young child in front of it.
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I lean over and grab a log off the top row of fire wood. A spider the size of a nickel dashes from the noon day sun for cover. Her thin brown legs scurry as fast as she can move into the cracks of the stack to disappear into the dark crevasses where no one can see her.

She is like a bad memory that moves deeper and deeper into the abyss of forgetting. She tries hard to escape. I move another log, and see her again.

I keep working at my woo pile one log at a time and reflect on this date in history.

It is December 7th, 2023, 82 years after the day Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II. Roosevelt in his radio address said, “a date which will live in infamy.”

I remember learning the word “infamy” in school.

It was one of the first “long words” I learned. A word that I didn’t use in sentences. A word that held so much weight it almost felt…

Audrey Stimson
Audrey Stimson

Written by Audrey Stimson

Writer and poet — essays and short stories. Experiencing life to the fullest while writing about our humanity. More about me

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