The Girl Next Door

Another bonus to living with my grandparents was that the neighbors also had a little girl. Her name was Matilda, she was one year younger than me but her mother often babysat me and we enjoyed playing together.

One particular day shortly after I had moved in with my grandparents I was at Matilda's house playing with my shiny new red ball (seriously, I was really excited about this ball). Matilda's mother asked me if  Matilda could borrow my ball, but I told her no because I had just gotten it. A fair response I think. You don't give your new ferrari to your teenager to drive! Anyway, myself, Matilda, and her mother were sitting on the living room floor taking turns rolling the ball back and forth between each other when for some reason her mother had to go into the kitchen.

What happened next still makes me cringe almost twenty years later. Matilda started yelling at me about not letting her keep MY ball and then she started chasing me around the living room in circles while I clutched the shiny, beautiful ball in my hands. And then she pounced, jumping onto my back and knocking me to the ground (she was younger, but I was very short). And then a pain like no other ripped into my back. She had bitten me right between the shoulder blades.

I don't know if she drew blood, I don't know if it even left a mark- though I assume it did. But, her mother came racing into the room as I screamed at the top of my lungs. Even as she carried me back home I screamed. And then my mother and grandmother and what felt like a whole other group of people put me in the brass bed on my stomach while they iced my very sore back. I screamed and cried for what felt like forever- IT HURT!

Later on Matilda's mother brought Matilda over to apologize and return my ball. I begrudgingly accepted her apology because I had to, but for some reason the ball was never the same. Probably because it probably wasn't worth having my flesh torn out over.  

To this day if someone rests their chin or makes a fist against my back I get goosebumps and feel a shiver of fear go down my spine.

Grandma's House

When my mother got pregnant with my sister, my family picked up and moved in with my grandparents in Pennsylvania. My dad was in the military so he wasn't able to be around as much as he'd like so it was off to grandmas house!

My grandmother made a room for me in the back bedroom and I started daycare in a small converted house across from a plant nursery. It was in the back bedroom (later converted to the computer room) that I did most of my playing and other random activities. There were two other bedrooms besides my grandparents room, the "Brass Bedroom" where my mother stayed and the"waterbed room" where my Aunt used to stay when she lived there.

My bedroom like most children's had plenty of toys, in particular a gadget connected to the end of the bed with random balls, beads, lights, and other random things that are intended to amuse small children.   One night after being told countless times to go to sleep and ignoring this I began to lean over the the end of the bed and play with this toy. I continued to play with it for several minutes as I always had and then leaned foreword further to reach something at the bottom. And that's when IT happened. I leaned to far and fell off the end of my bed, smashing my face into the plastic toy, and landing head first on the ground. Needless to say, tears and screaming ensued.

My grandmother was probably the best part of living in Pennsylvania. My mother worked at a dental office, my grandfather was a construction worker who often worked late, and my grandmother worked for the state, but as she was closer she almost always picked me up from daycare. At night she'd often sneak me out of the house to go to 3B's for ice cream or to the local Giant store for donuts. When I was sick it was always best to be taken care of by grandma. I remember getting chicken pox and being quarantined to the "tree house" are of the daycare until my grandma came to pick me up. When we got home she promptly made me a 'nest' on the couch and fed me tea, chicken noodle soup, and grandma utz chips.

When I was well, grandma always had an assortment of costumes consisting of various fancy dresses, hats, and furs that she had collected from yard sales that we would dress up in and have extravagant tea parties. Those tea parties were and still are the best part of grandma's house.

First Memories

I'm not sure what my first memory is. There seems to be so many early memories that I can't quite put a date on. But they're all in the same apartment and as we only lived in this house for two or three years so there's only a narrow margin of time in which the memories could have taken place. They're so vague, and yet when I think about them I can still imagine being there.

The first and probably my earliest...
I think I had to be about two. I was sitting in a big room and there was a ton of really bright yellow light coming in the window and a girl about my age with blonde hair who I was playing with. I don't know where the room is, it wasn't in our house. And if I was as young as I remember being, we'd of lived in a small apartment in a Virginia suburb not far from DC.

The living room of the first house I ever lived in

I remember also seeing the christmas tree in our house for the first time in my memory. It was tucked in a little sun room off of our living room. In the memory it's dark inside, but the tree is lit up so that it shines just perfectly. I don't know if there are any gifts under it, I just remember the awe of the tree and its glimmering lights.

And then there's the living room in the house. I had a yellow balloon on a stick that had escaped my diligent grasp and floated to the ceiling. I was so upset. My grandparents were there and everyone was trying to get the stupid thing down. It ended up on the stucco area of of ceiling and very quickly proceeded to pop, much to my terror and misery. Balloons are one thing that no child likes loosing, even though they know that eventually it will pop or deflate.

There's another memory as well, I'm probably about the same age. It's simple really, just my dad and I are walking around a small pond near our apartment and I'm holding my fluorescent pink and yellow soccer ball.  We're not doing much, just talking. Well I think he's talking mostly, I'm not sure if I have much of a vocabulary. Later on we walk back to our apartment and pass through a small basketball court where I start to play and make a bold attempt at hitting the basket. Of course the ball only goes about two feet up and misses the hoop by a mile. But you know how toddlers are, thrilled about everything.