Memories of a Child

After my parents had Kelly and Graham they had me. The five of us lived in the city. There were block wide games of cops and robbers, street hockey, and kick the can. I was queen of my red wood sandbox. Every year the spring brought the rain and the rain brought the worms. One year the spring brought Travis, my younger brother. When I realized the worms needed to be transported from the gutters to the tub in my backyard it wasn’t a problem that the little pink babies were the only ones I could hold without shrieking; Curtis lived next door and he carried the big juicy ones for me.

It was summer in my kingdom. Curtis and I were bringing large rocks in from the ally. We carried them together in the upturned lid from the garbage can. Suddenly the rock came tumbling out of control and landed on the big toe of my right foot. I’m sure it hurt, I must have cried.

I remember sitting in the brown truck, we each got popsicles from the ice cream man before driving away to the ‘big house’ in the suburbs. There was dirt where there should have been grass and show homes instead of other children. The ice cream man never came that far out of the way. Sometimes I would go into the city so I could play with Curtis. Once I peeked over his fence and saw a tall red compost bin. I didn’t see my sandbox.

 Grass was laid and a family moved in next door. I made friends with the boy named Daniel. We played Lego and built cushion forts in his basement; he was king. One day in the new house I looked down at my feet. My toenail had turned black and was hanging by a thread. I showed it to my dad, he pulled it off and threw it in the garbage.  It didn’t hurt at all.



***I handed this in today for my Life Writing class. The assignment was to write an excerpt of our autobiography....we were limited to one page which made it dificult to include all the details i wanted but i think i got the effect i was going for.