I was a girl a long time ago. I remember little bits and pieces of being two and five because of trauma and it appears I started to have many more memories from the age of eight. I'm not surprised as I tend to date my childhood by where I was or by what school I attended. The first 12 years of my life were lived in West Virginia. That was PD - also known as pre-divorce.
My earliest memory involved me getting cuts on my hands when I was attacked by a metal dollhouse that, I think, fell out of a closet on me when playing at a friend's house. I have 2 scars on my left hand. I called them "flap" and "wishbone" based on the way they look. I don't think about them much these days. Part of the reason I remember a bit about the day is that it was the day President Kennedy died, Nov 22, 1963. I would have been 22 months old. The news must have hit the doctor's office at the same time I was there for stitches. Nurses and my mom were upset and crying.
I remember racking myself on a bar and having to be seen by the doctor when I was five. That was the approximate time I attended my first funeral, that of a baby brother that didn't live due to medical problems my mother had. He almost made it. He was full term. I also remember something about our family home being robbed and my dad being really sad and scared. I was terrified because of that.
There are wisps of memories of waking up in the middle of the night to play with my toys in the dark. If my mom figured it out I got yelled at.
When I was five or six I was enrolled in kindergarten and I remember liking the big pencils and hating the fact that I was not allowed to write with my left hand. Is that the first time someone tried to change me? I also was a bit of a daredevil and rode my trike down the very steep driveway, over the road and over the hill and got caught up in brambles. I was scratched up but okay. My mom, on the other hand, probably lost one of her lives that day.
When we were little my dad would get ready for work and, when it snowed a lot (which was rare) he'd announce he was going off to "fight the elephants." Much later I figured out that he was going to "fight the elements" and it's a good memory.
When I was eight I liked to doodle on paper making connected random curves and then filling in each area with a different crayoned colour. I can still see the first booklet of my poetry in my head. One of these bits of artwork on white paper was stapled on top of some other pages. I don't have that anymore.
That was around the time when, even in summer, we were sent to bed before the night fell. Me and my brother and sister could lie abed and listen to our friends playing and shouting outside, sometimes chasing fireflies. It was a hard time.
By the time I was nine or ten I had made a white paste Christmas tree decorated with buttons and pretties my Grandma G. let me have and glitter! It was cool. There was a picture of it that has been lost.
My dad awakened to screams from us one night. A bat was flying round and swooping us. He was heroic in our minds but had a great deal of fear in finally cornering this creature under the water heater in the bathroom and helping move it away.
We used to get away to the nearby store that sold penny candy. We thought our mom didn't know but maybe she did. We always found pennies in drawers and took them without asking. I was a regular bandit one following summer stealing turnips from a neighbor's garden with unremembered co-conspirators.
About that same time frame I was walking to school with my siblings and we were horrified to see our black and white dog Valentine get hit by a car. We also had two kittens one summer named Stormy and Sunny who were bitten nearly in half by a dog but didn't die right away. Somehow my mom scooped them up in a box and we took them to a vet and he euthanized them. It still brings tears thinking about what those poor animals who I loved so dearly suffered. Finally our lassie dog jumped the fence in the back yard while leashed. She hung herself accidentally and, had my brother and sister and I not been there, would have died. We rushed 'round the fence and pushed her up screaming for help. We got the help but the dog, according to my mom, ended up going to live on a farm. I hope that's true.
I had been sleep walking off and on for a while. I navigated long steep stairs and was often found in the kitchen just staring into the fridge.
(not finished, come back later)
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