I have to admit, I'm not sure what my very earliest memory is, so I'll just go with what I can just manage to call up.
We lived in Amherst, New Hampshire at the time, on a bend in a road called Cross. My father had the house built when I was born, while my mother stayed in Washington, DC with her parents. And then, when I was 6 weeks old, off we went to the sticks -- my city-dwelling grandparents' opinion, not my own parents'.
Obviously I don't remember that part. What I remember is warmth and sunshine, birch trees we peeled the bark from (we called them the Paper Trees). There were Lady Slippers in the forest, creeping up on the firepit there. I never did learn who made that firepit and I have no memory of anyone in the neighborhood ever using it. I just know it was there and we weren't allowed to play in it.
I remember wild blueberry bushes on the slope in the front yard -- the house was on a hill -- and I remember being out there with my friends, our mothers sending us to the slope with our sandbox buckets to collect the fruit. It wasn't a chore. They were just getting us our of their hair for a while.
I remember our babysitter from across the street, a teenage girl who were so thrilled would even talk to us. I remember one time she was blowing bubbles and one popped right in my eye. And of course at 4, you think everyone does everything on purpose. I can still feel my temper break over that one.
I remember Kevin, the other kid across the street, who I was going to marry. Because, you know, he had really cool toys and we were the same. Didn't exactly work that way, but you know. At the time, it was everything.
Someone in the neighborhood had a Saint Bernard. For some reason I remember riding him. I don't know if that actually happened or I wanted it to, but he was a seriously large animal and I've always been a tiny human. It might have happened.
There was a lot of snow.
I remember the inside of the house, and eating cake donuts at the kitchen table with my father at the crack of dawn. My dad's ubiquitous breakfast of cinnamon donuts and black coffee. I tried the coffee and I remember being intrigued by it. Can't drink it that way now, though. He's since told me he learned to drink it black in the Army, because he had no choice. I keep telling he does now and he just grins at me.
We had a backdoor with the sun shining through and I would sit in that warm sunlight and just bask, like a lizard. Come to think of it, I still do that when I can.
The swing my father hung from the tree in the backyard. It was a rope and board affair, hung over the enormous branch on the enormous tree. Funny that the tree was there at all. By today's building standards the whole site would have been cleared, the lumber sold off, puny saplings anchored too firmly for their own good put down in its place. But we got lucky, and had a 100-year-old tree in the backyard, with a rope swing and a canopy of blessed shade and birds and my friend Wendy's cats lurking at the bottom waiting on them.
We had two cats of our own, Samson and Delilah. And a dog, Pepe, which was apparently short for Potage Poulet. Yes, someone named the dog Chicken Soup. I remember the dog being big and friendly, and Samson too, and Delilah getting up on the roof of the house so that my dad had to go get her. Probably used that tree to do it. She ate a lot of those birds, as it turned out.
And then, one day, we moved. Back to the Washington DC area, back to a better salary for my father, and into years of readjusting for me. I didn't handle it well; I had an accent, I had an attitude, and I hated the heat of the DC area. All this at age 4! It had to happen and I managed. But I still love lady slippers. And I miss that tree.
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