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childhood
November 2009 
What's your most vivid childhood memory?
Posted on Jul 2nd, 2009
by 
mimi
mimi
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for June 21, 2009:
SUMMER ---growing up in a tiny perfect little town, not even a town, too small to even be a town. But it had everything a kid like me needed. My sister Helen and I still talk about how lucky we were to have grown up where and when we did. When everything was uncomplicated and just there.
Some things were big and wonderous - like the giant weeds along the railway tracks where we played and took the shortcut to Grandma's house. We'd look on and under the leaves and find snakes, grasshoppers, praying mantis, cacoons, butterflies. We had instant stuff for science projects.
There were wild strawberries to collect, and hickory nut and walnut trees, plum, apple and cherry trees in neighbours' yards, loaded with fruit to pick, , and vegetable gardens where kids could just pick a tomato hot off the vine, or pull up a carrot and rinse it off under the outside tap. We had creeks to explore and knew when the polliwogs arrived, and we watched the red-winged blackbirds building nests in the bullrushes. We hated when the boys would pick the bullrushes and use them as a weapons, almost as bad as the chestnuts on strings they whipped at us.
We could sit in the shade of a huge chestnut tree at Kathleen Tronovsky's house across the street , or climb the walnut tree next door and hide on the lower limb. There were roses in everyone's front yard that climbed sparkling white trellises. People washed their porches and steps with garden hoses and then washed the sidewalk in front of their house.
After the supper dishes were done, kitchen counters cleaned and the floor swept, the mothers would go out for a walk around town and stop and talk to the other ladies doing the same, or talk to people sitting on their front porch. I liked when I got to go with her and we got invited up to sit on the porch. Usually, the ladies would open their front door, go in and bring out a drink and some snacks for us.. In the evening, we could hear the grown ups laughing as they gathered on each others porches and talked till sometimes 10 at night.
I remember the hot hot summers when I was about 5, trying to walk barefoot on the scorching sidewalk, after putting on my stretchy bubbly blue bathing suit and getting to the grassy patch in our tiny back yard. My dad made a sprinkler for the hose out of vinegar bottle cap. He punched some holes in the bottle cap, and attached a wire e to it to stick in the ground. My sister and I would run through the cold water and scream in delight. We'd get sunburned and not complain....
The day would end, and the air was always fresh with the smell of flowers and the sounds of insects singing late into the night -- Moths banged on the windows outside as we fell asleep, the dark green blinds banged softly inside with each gentle breeze.
Some things were big and wonderous - like the giant weeds along the railway tracks where we played and took the shortcut to Grandma's house. We'd look on and under the leaves and find snakes, grasshoppers, praying mantis, cacoons, butterflies. We had instant stuff for science projects.
There were wild strawberries to collect, and hickory nut and walnut trees, plum, apple and cherry trees in neighbours' yards, loaded with fruit to pick, , and vegetable gardens where kids could just pick a tomato hot off the vine, or pull up a carrot and rinse it off under the outside tap. We had creeks to explore and knew when the polliwogs arrived, and we watched the red-winged blackbirds building nests in the bullrushes. We hated when the boys would pick the bullrushes and use them as a weapons, almost as bad as the chestnuts on strings they whipped at us.
We could sit in the shade of a huge chestnut tree at Kathleen Tronovsky's house across the street , or climb the walnut tree next door and hide on the lower limb. There were roses in everyone's front yard that climbed sparkling white trellises. People washed their porches and steps with garden hoses and then washed the sidewalk in front of their house.
After the supper dishes were done, kitchen counters cleaned and the floor swept, the mothers would go out for a walk around town and stop and talk to the other ladies doing the same, or talk to people sitting on their front porch. I liked when I got to go with her and we got invited up to sit on the porch. Usually, the ladies would open their front door, go in and bring out a drink and some snacks for us.. In the evening, we could hear the grown ups laughing as they gathered on each others porches and talked till sometimes 10 at night.
I remember the hot hot summers when I was about 5, trying to walk barefoot on the scorching sidewalk, after putting on my stretchy bubbly blue bathing suit and getting to the grassy patch in our tiny back yard. My dad made a sprinkler for the hose out of vinegar bottle cap. He punched some holes in the bottle cap, and attached a wire e to it to stick in the ground. My sister and I would run through the cold water and scream in delight. We'd get sunburned and not complain....
The day would end, and the air was always fresh with the smell of flowers and the sounds of insects singing late into the night -- Moths banged on the windows outside as we fell asleep, the dark green blinds banged softly inside with each gentle breeze.
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oh mimi, what a perfectly wonderful tale from your childhood. I'm soo enjoying reading your words along with my morning coffee.. feeling the love you have for your life oozing out between the lines. I see that lil girl very clearly in you today, you are a delight <3
I'm with Tara, you are such a delight, Mimi. And as you recalled here your childhood memories, mine flashed before my eyes, those wondrous and carefree times. This reminds me of the prose poem in the preface of James Agee's book “A Death in the Family” entitled “Knoxville: Summer of 1915”. Here are the two links from youtube.com of this prose poem set to music by Samuel Barber and as sung by Leontyne Price in 1968. (two parts to the video)
Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1I1WMCX0rU
Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fb5HGbLU1po
Here is the text to follow along:
[“We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”] It has become that time of evening when people sit on their porches, rocking gently and talking gently, and watching the street and the standing up into their sphere of possession of the trees, of birds' hung havens, hangars. People go by: things go by. A horse, drawing a buggy, breaking his hollow iron music on the asphalt: a loud auto; a quiet auto; people in pairs, not in a hurry, scuffling, switching their weight of aestival body, talking casually, the taste hovering over them of vanilla, strawberry, paste-board, and starched milk, the image upon them of lovers and horsemen, squared with clowns in hueless amber. A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping: belling and starting, stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks: the iron whine rises on rising speed: still risen, faints: halts: the faint stinging bell: rises again, still fainter: fainting, lifting, lifts, faints foregone: forgotten. Now is the night one blue dew. Now is the night one blue dew, my father has drained, he has coiled the hose. Low on the length of lawns, a frailing of fire who breathes … Parents on porches: rock and rock. From damp strings morning glones hang their ancient faces. The dry and exalted noise of the locusts from all the air at once enchants my eardrums. On the rough wet grass of the backyard my father and mother have spread quilts. We all lie there, my mother, my father, my uncle, my aunt, and I too am lying there. They are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all. The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near. All my people are larger bodies than mine … with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth, and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening. among the sounds of the night. May God bless my people, my uncle, my aunt, my mother, my good father, oh, remember them kindly in their time of trouble, and in the hour of their taking away. After a little I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am.
This is one of my favorite pieces and performances of all times. Thanks for sharing Mimi - I can hear the hoses hissing on the Summer lawns and I can feel the sleepiness in my little eyes.
yeah….I have grand memories of childhood too. Wading pools are slowly becoming extinct. And way too many rules to abide by when you finally get near one. Liability sucks.
We were such a small place and it was so long ago that no wading pools existed till I was a teenager. We cooled off in the back yard in a big zinc tub filled with hose waterand ran through the sprinkler. The boys went to the canal banks and jumped off the piers. Sometimes the boys would trap the girls who couldn't swim on the piers and threaten to throw them in. They also swam in the dam which was very dangerous because there was a severe undertow when water was drawn for the Lift locks. Several boys drowned there. There were no rules out there except the ones the bully boys made. It was hard being a little girl back then. There were no nice boys back then.
These passages are the stuff of which books are made. Have you ever thought of writing one?
We didn't have a wading pool back on my grand-parents farm in Manitoba, only a huge cow trough which my grandfather filled with water. My brother and I (ages 7 and 8) would sit in it up to our necks to escape the stiffling heat of a Manitoba summer. One day, our two year old sister, who was standing at the side of the tub watching, got frightened by a train whistle (the tracks were quite close to the farm) and leapt into the tub in a rush of adreneline. That became a story which was retold and told again at family functions. Ta for this post, what a pleasure to be transported back in time.
Definitely brought back many memories, especially of running through the sprinklers, sitting in large old laundry tubs filled with cold water (that would warm naturally in the sun) and the tall rose trellises. In our back yard, we didn't have a rose trellise, but we had HUGE rose bushes that sprawled out and divided off the garden from the back lawn (which was big enough to play baseball), except you had to avoid running into one of the long poles that we strategically placed to hold up the long wire clothes-lines which all converged at two old telephone poles. We used to take an old leather belt and shinny up the poles, with the occasional sprained wrist or ankle when we lost our grip. Parents today would have a fit at some of the things we did, I'm sure!
I guess it's pointless to say that, as a community builder, I spend my time yearning for such experiences for our children today. Dryad just posted the most amazing painting she painted, and based on that I confessed that I spend my time on earth mostly yearning. These experiences you recall do reflect our true wealth. In the history of humankind, when have we been able to create and share them? Without war, hunger, forced labor, ignorance and malice to preempt them? Without rushing around in the SUV to be whisked from one set of lessons to another? To roam without fear of the serial pervert? To not have so many rules that play is impossible? To be able to trust in the goodwill of our community, however small?
mimi … I read your post the other day, and came back again today to enjoy it again. It really evokes the days of yesteryear, and a time when children were still allowed to be children. Fireflies being caught in glass jars (yes, GLASS jars). Hide and seek in the back garden. The Joker from your parent's deck of cards clothespinned to the spokes of your bike tires, making that clickity-clackety sound all the way down the block. Thanks for dredging up some of the memories of a time gone by. Your descriptions are so alive and vivid …. we can practically hear the moths as they flutter against the window. Thanks for sharing this post.