I’m supposed to be writing my life story for our home study.  It seems like I’ve done it a time or two before in college and high school, but I doubt I have copies of those.  I thought maybe I could make a few blog posts out of stories from my childhood.  It doesn’t appear I have anything interesting going on in the present (at least not interesting enough to blog about in the past two months).  So, without further ado…

My first grade year, the year before my family moved to Cameron, Missouri, we lived in an old farmhouse in Hendersonville, Tennessee.  I remember it being a pretty cool place to live.  There was a creek running beside it, and my brother and I loved catching tiny, tiny frogs in and around it.  We were able to witness firsthand all the stages of a frog’s life, including seeing two frogs stuck together laying and fertilizing eggs.  We got baby ducks for Easter that year, and they would waddle around and splash in the creek.  There was also a very cool rock formation out in the woods behind the house, just a wide, flat area that had probably been a wider creek bed in an earlier time.  We called it our play house, and we would spend hours out there playing make believe to our heart’s content.  We used various bits of nature (rocks, sticks, leaves, etc.) as well as a few toys to create our little world.  One of my favorite make-believe things was making “butter” by rubbing dandelions on a rock to make it yellow.

We jokingly called it the house “where you never bathe alone.”  It was pretty much true.  The house was very old, and not insulated.  All manner of small creatures lived with us, and invariably there were several bugs that had to be washed out of the tub before you could bathe.  A lot of mornings you would turn on the lights in a room and you could see slug trails across the carpet.  I had no idea then, but mom told me recently that we were very poor when we lived in that house.  We couldn’t afford to pay our gas bill, so we went without heat that winter.  She said that we lived in two rooms during that time, with blankets hung up to cover windows and doorways.  She cooked in the kitchen with gloves on, and it got so cold that the water froze in the toilets.  But for us kids, it was just an adventure.  I don’t remember being cold, or having a frozen toilet.  I certainly don’t remember being poor.  I do remember the blankets hung up, and the kerosene heater (the smell of which still whisks me back to childhood), but that’s about it.  I remember having fun, living in the country, being totally secure that my family was taking care of me.

It makes more sense to me now, why we moved away the next year.  Any job opportunity would have been better than going another winter without heat.  I’m just so proud of and thankful to my mom for keeping our troubles away from us kids, and letting us stay kids while we could.

“Flying Dreams” by Paul Williams (from The Secret of N.I.M.H.)