Childhood Questions

I remember a particularly vivid memory from when I was about six. My grandmother owned a daycare, Kid Kingdom in Rogersville, so I spent a lot of my childhood there after and before school. My grandparents lived on the top floor, and the daycare was on the bottom. I remember being in the yard, or playground, and my grandfather who was forty-five at the time was with my brother and they were shooting off cap guns. It is important to note that anything that made a loud popping sound or a loud crack scared me. So when my brother and grandfather ran around shooting at me with cap guns it was particularly traumatic. I knew that there were no bullets in a cap gun, but it was still a scary gun to me. Im sure they would probably scare me even to this day if someone pointed one at me and pulled the plastic trigger, but who knows.

For the first three months of first grade we relocated to Washington state. My sister’s father had family up there and thought that we would be okay up there or something to that extent. My little sister was a baby at the time, my brother was six, and I a year younger than him. The school was different than kindergarten. We didn’t know anyone and we didn’t quite know how to belong to a school like this. There was this girl, I forget her name, but she liked to bully us for this reason. She loved to boss us around, she lived in the same apartment complex as we did so we saw her often. She was in the second grade, just like my brother, yet she was mean to us like she was much older. One day she was messing around with a can of orange soda, the can was empty. We were all outside and my sister and her dad were upstairs in our apartment. The mean girl got her thumb stuck in her soda can and she was yelling at us as if it were our fault. Her tone soon after grew angrier and she was telling us to go get someone to help. We went up to our room and my sister’s dad got her finger unstuck. I think that her knowing that we had the power to do absolutely nothing made her a bit more accepting. She stopped bullying us, but we never became friends. We later found out that she had a crush on my brother, who’d have thought?

I have never broken a bone before, well not that I know of anyway, but I have always been a very clumsy person. It is actually pretty surprising to me that I didn’t get hurt seriously too much as a kid. I do recall one time when I hurt my arm pretty bad when I fell from a ledge on the side of the house I lived in, in Arkansas. I remember the day quite clearly, my stepfather was forcing us to work outside until twelve pm. It had gotten pretty hot, and I got tired. I just wanted to go inside, but he locked the door to the house so we couldn’t go inside. We had no way of telling what time it was or how long we had left until twelve. So me, being the smart twelve year old I was, thought it was a good idea to step on a rock ledge right next to the kitchen window to look and see the time displayed on the stove. Turns out the rock wall wasn’t too sturdy, and part of it broke at the edge and I went tumbling. We had thirty minutes left, but my arm didn’t feel okay. My mother took me to the nearest hospital, forty-five minutes away, and I had to wear my arm in a sling for a couple of weeks. At least I got out of thirty minutes of work and heat. To this day I am still a very clumsy person, I reconnected with that fact when I got a job.