Tuesday May 1, 2001
I've been having a bad time with the computers in my house and I'm to the point where I'm ready to start pulling out my hair. I hate not being able to come and go freely online and to wonder when the computer is going to freeze up next. As I'm writing this I'm being careful to save after every sentence so that if my computer locks up again at least I won't have lost everything.
I've spent my free time somewhat wisely today. I've been thinking actually and for me that tends to be a dangerous thing. I was thinking of my childhood, one of the better parts. I had a cousin who was about 10 months older than me and we were really close growing up. My parents would take me and my brother and sister to see her family every weekend. I have so many memories of that town and how huge it seemed when I was little. I wish I could view everything in life like that. Like it was a huge adventure waiting for some lucky kid like me to come along and discover all it's funny little secrets.
My mom lives in that town now and I went home to Kansas just a couple of months ago. My car broke down and I was stranded there for almost 2 weeks so I put Dare in a stroller and went off with Elijah to explore the town. Everything is so different now.
The grade school was a block from my cousin's house and we'd go there every day to play. It had this slide that had pipe handles to hold onto and we used to stick rock "money" into the pipes to pay the toll to slide down. The school was shut down and the equiptment removed. There used to be a stand of trees on the edge of town with a little stream flowing through. One winter we went with my cousin's older sister and some of her friends and slid around on the ice with our shoes. Of course then this big fat kid fell and broke the ice and pissed us both off. The trees aren't there anymore though.
My cousin used to live in a pink house on Cleavland Street with a huge front yard (where I lost my front teeth playing softball) and a smallish backyard. There was a towering oak tree in the back that we used to climb to get away from my younger siblings. We used to let the garden hose flow down the alley and collect in the gutter and then we'd splash around in the mud until we had this brown frothy mixture that we called chocolate milk. I realize how lame this sounds now, but it was one of our favorite things to do back then and we'd spend hours making the perfect chocolate milk. I remember the bedroom that was a converted attic and all the toys we used to play with. I remember everything about that house, but it's vacant now. Walking past now I see that the "towering" oak is a scraggly little thing. It's actually pretty depressing.
Maybe the lifestyle I have of moving all the time is actually better for the kids than living in one place their whole lives. Who wants to see their favorite memories become just a faded part of a town's history? Maybe it's better to just keep your memories as that. Something in your mind and heart to look back on.
