There was this time my mom and I took walks in Texas. We were always excited to hear the birds (different birds than in Pennsylvania!) and we even saw a few Road Runners! One rainy evening, I almost stepped on a snake. This was surprising, since we were on the lookout for Texas wildlife, and we were walking slowly.

The snake was red and black and yellow and my mom and I stared at it for a bit before walking away.
“Is it dead?” I asked. “Is it real?”

I sent a picture to my kids.

My mom said, “There’s a rhyme about this… yellow next to red, something dead… ” She couldn’t remember the exact rhyme, of course so we circled back to the snake to get another look and a utility worker noticed our gaze.

“Uh-Oh,” he said as he came over to get a close look.

“There’s a rhyme of some sort…” my mom said to him.

“Red touch black, safe for Jack. Red touches yellow, kills a fellow.” the man said and we all looked down at the snake. Red touches yellow….

My phone buzzed with a text. H had written, “Ha. Ha. Ha.”

The utility worker kicked the snake.

“Or, it’s a toy.” he said, with a smile.

My mom and I walked away, talking about how this was a little bit too close to the bear outside of my cabin. . . or even the mouse poop. . .

There were woods behind my childhood home-

I got there by going through an overgrown hedge, next to the small cave I made in a wisteria bush. Sometimes on my own, sometimes with a friend.

We’d climb this evergreen with low hanging branches and sweep the forest floor with the lowest branch. I don’t remember many details from childhood, but I remember the swaying of that branch and how it made the pine needle floor smooth below.

We also collected cigarette butts in an old orange soda can. We were obsessed with cigarettes, for some reason. It was the eighties, that might be a good excuse. We’d pretend to smoke the butts, and then collect them in the can: a good deed for the forest, mixed with an odd view of adulthood, and the glamour of smoking.

Probably if you are younger than me, you don’t understand the cigarette glamour. This is a good thing, I think, that there isn’t that same glamour now. But my imagination was a wild thing back then, unbounded. And I loved to imagine what it would be like to be an adult.

Now I try to imagine what it was like to be a child with an imagination,
and wild raspberry bushes up the street
and a pump station that looked like a magical brick cottage to me
and a field across the street with water runoff that were barbie rivers
and turtles found on the side of the road, kept for a week and then returned
and stuffed animals on leashes for walks
and fairies that lived under couches
and 12 foot pools, 18 inches deep that felt like lakes for hours of inner tubing

and of course, the woods behind the hedge next to the wisteria cave –

The woods are condos now.
But I drive by and think of my tree, and how the low branch swept the forest floor clean.

Have I ever told you how my memories are like blurs of pictures and sounds and feelings? I remember the same things over and over, but not too many things. Thank goodness for childhood friends who fill in the gaps. And even then the memories aren’t crisp enough for actual articulation. But even a slice of a memory makes me feel like I’ve caught it.

Have I ever told you about the boy in preschool who dumped a cup of water on me – on my pretty new white sweater with flowers? We were at the water table, and I was so mad when it happened. I don’t remember why I thought water on a sweater was the worst thing in the world, but it was. It really was.

Have I ever told you about how my friends and I were so obsessed with robbers, that we made robber stew in potholes after it rained. Our imaginations were so powerful that we thought, for sure, a robber would be so hungry on the prowl that they would definitely eat the stew we made with the poisonous berries, twigs, mud and stones. We even wrapped the rope swing around the swingset, making sure we would confuse the robbers if they tried anything with that swingset. Did we think they were going to steal it or maybe play on it? I don’t know. It’s fuzzy.

Have I ever told you about how my friend and I would stare out the window into the dark during a sleepover? We would convince ourselves that there were robbers out there. Robbers! The scariest thing ever when I was 7. My mom would come in and sigh, “You are scaring yourselves!” and threaten to separate us for the rest of the sleepover if we continued. Separating from my best friend – even scarier than robbers. We stepped away from the dark window, and held hands until we fell asleep.

Have I ever told you about how one day I heard my mom and dad whispering. They told me to go back in my room. I couldn’t hear them at all, but I could tell they were making a plan. Some sort of surprise. When they called me back out, I said “Are we going miniature golfing?” and they were so confused – how did I know the plan?

Have I ever told you about the day that we were having a big picnic and my best friend and her family and the German family they had staying with then were there. The four of us, all around 8 or 9, I think, we went in to dress up, including stuffing rolls of socks in our shirts. All was fun and games until we emerged back outside, lumpy fake breasts sticking out. Embarrassing. Oh, I remember the embarrassment. (Somewhere there is a picture of us, and if I had it, I’d share it, because now it is only hilarious.)

Have I ever told you about going across country when I was 10? We stopped at a Mexican restaurant and I ordered chicken enchiladas. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t good. I sat there looking at my plate wondering why I was eating chicken. We didn’t eat much meat, but still. I made the real connection at that table. “This chicken was once walking around as a chicken.” I said, or thought, who knows – the memory is blurry. And I decided then and there to be a vegetarian.

Have I ever told you that later when we drove back from Mexico, I leaned on the dozen or more Mexican blankets my mom had bought. I rested in the backseat and read Archie comics maybe the whole way. An early vegetarian, before carsickness got ahold of me, reading instead of looking out the window at the glorious landscape. How odd.

Memories are strange things, how they blur and fuzz and repeat. I’m trying to live in the present though, after all – the present is when all those memories happened, right?