Childhood Memories:
Growing up and the house we grew up in holds significant memories for me. It was a yellow-and-white four bedroom two-story house.. We lived on a dead-end street so there was plenty of playing with the neighbor kids in backyards and on the street.
There were several big trees in our backyard that I used to climb, including a Cottonwood with a swing on it. We had a couple lilac trees that smelled oh-so-fresh in the spring. I remember one May Day (May 1st) I went and put a bouquet of lilacs on a friendly older woman's door at the end of our street.
One neighbor down the street just-a-couple-houses, my family met when I was in about first grade. They had a son about my age, and I am thankful to say we are still friends. He always had some new toy to entertain, and his dad had built a nice tree-house with a rope swing from the tree in the center of their backyard.
One Christmas, he got a slinky, and I remember watching it fall down his carpeted stairs in the bedazzling motion of a slinky.
My Sister's and my backyard had bushes and the cottonwood in the middle (length-wise) of our yard near the back porch, and in the central-back, a tall pine tree. We would look up into its high-up branches and see boards previous owners had put up there as a kind of tree house. . . . We never made it up there, though. When I was a little older we planted a couple rows of raspberries in the far-right corner of our yard. There happened to be rhubarb growing from the ground in that same area.
The left (west) side of our house had a couple azalea bushes between which our tin garbage cans were (before we were given plastic bins by the city), and behind them a couple dense apple trees--not very fun to climb in considering the scratches you would get from trying to make it up into the tree.
Behind that was a rusty-old-clothesline, and around ninth grade, I remember, to my surprise I did nineteen or twenty pull-ups on the end bar.
Watermelons have a place in my memory as well--opening up a big, red, juicy one and sitting on the curb eating it with neighborhood friends. Another summer snack my Mom would make was orange juice pop-cycles or pop-cycle cups with yogurt and fruit frozen in them.
My room was "off from the other bedrooms," a step-down from the kitchen with a thin layer of green carpet, wood-paneled walls and a mysterious "trap door to the attic" above my bed.
I'm thankful for these memories, and as my sister and I grow older, we share more with each other, through talking, in contrast to the growing-up we shared and our views of each other at the time.
One more memory: Once a friend from my Dad's work took my Dad, my sister, and I in a private airplane ride. I remember flying over SE Portland and how we purposely flew over our house and saw it sitting there below us.
Other random memories:
Freshly
Mowed Grass
The smell of freshly-cut grass is
something I am very familiar with, because I mowed our big-back-yard at our
house growing up. The backyard was
almost an acre, and it had to be mowed using a walk-behind mower, because that
was all we had.
Our Springer Spaniel Abby was there
for company. I knew her for most of my
life, having gotten her as a puppy when I was in first grade, until my Dad had
her put to sleep when I was about nineteen as my parents had divorced and my
Mom was selling our house and thus no one could care for her anymore. The story goes that my father took her on a
“last-walk” around Mount Tabor before she was put to sleep.
Our backyard was spotted by various
trees and a “climbing toy,” made out of wood, with a ladder and a hanging bar—a
child’s delight; my Dad had gotten the design from a book.
Giving the lawn a mow was like
giving it a fresh haircut, which gave it an entirely new look. On the same “length” it was especially nice
when Abby got a fresh and thorough groom . . . .
“Hey Abby-dog, hey back-yard; it’s
the “new you.”
The Best Coin
Quarters are nice because they're a quarter of a dollar and they have neat pictures and inscriptions on them (one for every state now), but my favorite coin is a nickle because you can really make it roll. It's smooth side-edge lets it go a long way, as I remember rolling it in the mall or other hard-floor places.
Memory of Summer Working at Camp
In my first summer working as a Counselor-in-Training when I was seventeen, during training week
at the beginning of the summer, I had some free-time, and as I was walking back toward the hill to the wagon circle, I heard some pine-cones dropping from up in a fir or cedar tree.
Learning to just be and enjoy nature, I lay down in the trail underneath the tree on my back and looked up. I imagine that though the "squirrel-culprit" could not think as advanced as to notice me, if it did, it probably thought I wouldn't mind as it went about its business, and I watched the work of a creature of nature, proving its instinct.
This was my first summer working at a camp I had gone to and loved as a kid: this summer as a C-I-T; and then as a Counselor when I was nineteen was the hardest, yet most fulfilling job I ever had hitherto in my life.
Again, during the "training week" as a C-I-T, at a break between classes and training sessions, I sat on an almost-hidden-fallen-tree and read Psalm 104, which I had never read before. I took in with wonder how it talks about creation and God as the Creator provides for both man and beast. It talks about lions going out to search for prey at night, and going back to their dens in the morning. As I read of rivers coming up from the valleys and God providing for sea creatures like Leviathan as well as birds of all kinds and smaller creatures like "rock badgers" that lived in holes in the cliffs, the provision of God made sense to me.
Being awakened to a new side of life--of deeper spirituality--my experience on the log seemed to concur with what I was reading. As God watches over creation, so He watches over our lives, teaching us of His Fatherhood and the worthy thing a life worshiping God is.
Other wonders of this camp, was the blue scrub-jay which had made its nest just outside the counselor-den's window on a branch, and her nest of baby birds.
"Seeing it"--There was lots to see and "take-in" in this beautiful camp. Another animal I and my campers saw was a pileated woodpecker, making its "pecking" hollow sound into a cottonwood or pine tree.
The wonder of spiritual growth that comes from really helping kids and leading them to a relationship with God was the most significant part of the summer, and I am just one of my generation and "band-of-friends" who can testify to a camp's beauty, adventure, and the spiritual "high-ness" that comes from a summer serving God.
