remember

home alone

once when i was old enough to tell time but too young to think that time flies, i decided to stay home alone while the rest of the family drove to a nearby town to go to the pharmacy. i didn't feel like going, and my parents supported my independence. after they left, i started watching the clock, and after what seemed like forever to me but was probably only about 30 minutes, i decided it was time for them to come back. when they didn't, i put on my little yellow wool cardigan sweater, and rode my tricycle down the gravel road a quarter of a mile, arriving unannounced at our neighbour's house. i was there, making cookies with their oldest daughter, when my parents got back home.

no seatbelts

my mom drove a yellow volkswagen bug. it had a tiny storage compartment behind the back seat, made to hold a small suitcase or a bag of groceries. i rode back there. not only did i squeeze in this space alone, i sat in this trunk area cross-legged, sharing the space with my friend jessica. it was before the days of seatbelts and child seats.

when i wasn't playing houdini, i sat in front. once i was in the front passenger seat, at age seven, holding six-month-old samantha on my lap. when she started to cry, mom looked over and drove our car off the gravel road, over the bank and into the grassy trench on the side. i screamed, and mom, pulling back onto the road, said "shannon, calm down, i'm just driving in the ditch."

poptop camping

by the time i was a teenager, i had seen half of the united states. most of them i saw from the window of a car or our allotted spot at the state's nearest koa kampground. we took road trips for almost every holiday, which allowed me to see the incredible diversity of the country and the nation's sites, from the biltmore house to paul bunyan park. i celebrated my sixth birthday at paul bunyan park, and not only did i get a postcard of paul bunyan and his ox but paul said my name and wished me happy birthday. i was speechless.

we took many of these trips in a 1970s volkswagen bus with a westfalia pop-top, a extra tent-like compartment that opens out of the top of the bus and can sleep two or three small children comfortably, four if you are me and my siblings. we liked the fact that it had a screened window we could look through to see the stars.

disco duck

as an eight-year-old tap dancer, my class performed "disco duck" at our annual recital. we were dressed in red sequined leotards with black feathers in our hair. i don't remember what song we danced to for the ballet portion of the recital, but i am quite certain it couldn't have been any more embarrassing.

fireflies

in the early evening, when the sun is setting and the smells of pine and moisture are in the air, the fireflies come out in rural iowa. when i was a very small girl, i chased their tiny lights and captured them between my palms. if i cupped my hands, and peeked in to the darkness, i could see the faint firefly glow.

my siblings and i put them in glass jars, punching air holes in the lid and giving them a twig to perch on. we kept them, twinkling, until morning, and then we let them go.

cars and trucks and things that go

my brother raleigh and i are less than two years apart in age, and when we were little, we spent hours playing together. i know that many little girls played with barbies as kids. not me, although we did have tea parties where we cut mini snickers bars into little slices and fed them to our dolls.

raleigh and i never cared much about the whole concept of gender-appropriate games. we moved back and forth from his toys to mine without a second thought. one of our favorite activities was playing with matchbox cars. raleigh had a book, which i think was a richard scarry, called "cars and trucks and things that go" and that was what we called it when we got out the cars. it wasn't good enough to just say we were playing with cars or even playing with cars and trucks. no. it was always cars and trucks and things that go.

i'm not sure what other "things that go" we had in our collection--most of them fell in the car and truck categories--but i do remember that raleigh had evil kanevil on a motorcycle and he could do a 360-degree loop on a track.

iowa summer

lee dee

our house in iowa was right next to the unity church, and on sunday mornings, the organist, lee duell, used to arrive early. lee was a young guy when we were kids, and i guess we probably drove him crazy. we used to have a little chant we'd say whenever lee arrived at church to practice the organ in the morning before the service. it went like this: "lee dee, let him be, he is always early."

second placer

stephanie is four years older than me. we used to race across the lawn, and she would always win. she would say "first placer" as she crossed the finish line, and i would folow with "second placer."

playing mary

instead of playing house, stephanie and i used to play "little house on the prarie." i was blonde and she was older and made the rules, so i was always mary. i was always jealous of stephanie because i wanted to be laura.

we must not have been very old, because i remember once we had to stop playing so mom could put a diaper on me before bed.