Thinking....

Today I had some free time at work so I was reading the blog of a wonderful old Swedish lady that used to be a Physical Therapist during World War II. She writes the story of her life from when she came to America as a young girl through the war years and all of the experiences she had and the people she met.

It got me to wondering how far back I can remember. How old was I when my memories began to stick with me so that I can pull them out and look them over from time to time. I think I was about 4 or 5 years old and we lived in an old house on a place called Castle Rock down on the border of California and Mexico. There were only four of us kids then. We lived in a house on the back side of a creek with a big rock near the bridge and I was told that a King snake lived in that rock. I remember the Lilac bushes that bloomed and how much my mother loved them. We had a bench swing that would hold all of us kids at one time. I know some of my memories are reinforced by the home movies Dad took and we watched over and over on his old reel to reel projector with the collapsable screen. But some of them are my memories...like the old couple that lived on the place with us and how they used to buy huge bags of popcorn for us. I remember the race horses we took care of as part of our rent on the house. One was named Ding Dong Daddy. The house seemed huge to me as a small child. I remember being afraid at night because there was a big tree outside my bedroom window that shook in the wind. I had a cat named Jerry, a gray and white striped cat that was attacked by some wild animal in the hills behind our house and his stomach was torn open. Dad used some horse medicine on it and stitched it back up. The cat lived just fine after that. We had a partially blind German shepherd named Topsy and a short black weiner dog whose name esapes me at the moment.

I went back to see the place several years ago when my son was about 5 and it looked so different...so much smaller. The horse corrals were still in use and the bridge was there. I don't know about the Lilac bushes. We couldn't get close enough to see before the people who live there now came out to ask us to leave. Memories...