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Highlights
by Annelise Zepf Sievert
How I became a Brazilian American
Highlights by Annelise Zepf Sievert, Copyright © 2011 Around the World Publishing: Smashwords Edition
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form.
By Annelise Zepf Sievert
2011
It started many years back. I can’t exactly remember when. The first time I thought of becoming a writer, was when I really started to enjoy reading books. I was then about fourteen and every moment I could find I was somewhere no one could disturb me and reading. My favorite place was an old Eucalyptus tree where none of the neighborhood children could climb up. My mother could never find me to help her around the house. There high in the tree I would sit and read till dusk. I was a regular book worm and since I was of two nationalities I read in two languages; Portuguese and German. Mystery books were my favorite. Expedition stories, no matter where, captivated me. I lived and acted through many of the main character personalities.
The story telling began when my two girl friends left me alone for one summer. My brother, five years younger than I, and his friend Peter, would wait for me to come home from school. I was the baby sitter for my brother when Mother would go shopping. I had promised mother not to take my brother on any of “my dangerous expeditions” this left me with little to do with him. Then one rainy summer afternoon we were near an old cave left over from the revolution between the states of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. This was a secret cave I shared with my girl friends June and Beling. I guided the two boys into the cave and my brother and his friend became the focus of the story telling. After that we would often go to the cave where I would continue telling the latest story. They accepted me because, I was a tomboy and able to out climb all the boys and girls in the neighborhood. My story telling flowed from my imagination and the reading I had done or was doing. I adapted the stories for their age.
That summer was the start of my story telling. It went on for many years. It was at that time I began to imagine myself as a famous writer. It was up there in the tree where my first idea of writing books as good as the writers I read started. I had a few stories in my mind and began putting them down on paper. I had many story ideas and I put them down in my “book”. One day my father found my “book”. He read it and laughed and that was the end for my writing. I would continue to think of stories but I never took the chance of writing it down.
Many years have passed since I first started to think about writing. Many things have happened to me during those years. Life’s many turns seem to have intervened each time I made the attempt to write. I married, had three children, divorced, emigrated to the United States, made my living as an insurance sales person, taught ball room dancing, remarried twice, took up oil painting and tried several times at sharpening my writing skills. I attended writing school and my dream seemed much closer. But I also realized it was much more difficult then I had imagined. I found out, writing is a real art and the thoughts one might have sound so different once put on paper.
It never dawned on me that one day when I was old I would sit down and put it all to paper. Now at eighty five, grand mother of eight, great grandmother of eleven, I am once again “putting pen to paper”.
The saying is; “It’s never too late”.
Well I hope this is true.
So let’s try it one more time.
By Annelise Zeph Sievert
“No!” would have been my answer many years ago.
It all started when my parents, who originally tried to emigrate from Germany in 1924 to the United States, were denied a visa and ended up in Brazil instead. I look back and call it fate. On their trip to Brazil by ship they met some Catholic Priests who knew Brazil. My Father, a Mechanical Engineer, learned of a job in Itajuba a small town in the state of Minas Gerais almost in the middle of Brazil. Once there he became a teacher in a small college. He became well known in the town. He continued to follow his ambition and a few years later he managed to open his own business.