From the sandy coastlines to the blue mountain ridges. I find I miss the flat prairies then the pastoral lands.
As a child I lived most outdoors. I ran usually barefoot. If one would have called me a tomboy to my face I would have laughed and not been offended.
I played in the creek most days beside our house. I climbed sycamores, and heard stories of boys that made forts. I made a fort. My best friend and I would catch minnows in our hands. We would scoop them off the giant slab we christened Perhistoric rock for the hollows in its face from the years of currents that appeared to be the foot prints of dinasaurs.
We made potions and mashed them with rocks of wild onions, snake berries and bitter apple. We nursed a fallen baby robin back to life.
We would jump off the old wooden bridge to the sand bar to see how far we could fly.
We would walk across limbs that hung over the stream to prove how daring we were.
We would tip-toe through the cow pasture to Old Lady Perkins farm. One day she spotted us. We had been sitting on her bridge tossing goldfish crackers down to the tiny fish to eat and laughing.
She had a hand of snuff and a mouth of pure Appalachian. She hung her own tobacco in the barn out back.
The acreage across the street once had horses and a crab apple tree. I would run after school to feed them by the gate.
When that lot was sold and a house built, the neighbors were nice to me. They had never had a daughter. They had one older son and two twins later on. They never seem to mind that I would jump the fence and cut across the creek to the pond and sit on their dock. They never ran me off when I was holding a bullfrog. They were from Greece and I loved the way they spoke to me.
When I got Ralph my Pekin, people would laugh to see a girl taking a duck down to the river and the pond to show it how to swim. Ralph thought I was her mother. Yes, Ralph turned out to be a girl. My parents got mad when they discovered I was not keeping her in her hutch at night but sleeping with her in my bed. Ralph loved to waddle behind me talking every day when I would come home from school.
My parents loved all animals. We had a weird kind of home. Some we fostered to nurse back that were injured or abused and neglected, few we ever kept.
My rabbit, I got to keep. I would pull snowball in my red wagon for miles. Snowball loved for people to pet him. He had a good life, until the neighbors dogs got lose. My mom heard the screams. A rabbit can scream you know...but it was too late. Most my family is buried in the apple orchard.
Ralph got to be with her own kind when she got older. She went to Bali Hi, a bird sanctuary with others of her kind. I would go visit her. She showed off to me her ducklings.
Some summers I left the mighty mountains and headed to the land of the big sky. It was there that I would watch the trains and see herd of buffalo and wild coyotes. I was used to seeing for so long glimpses of the sky from mountain peaks. The prairies filled with golden flowers is a sight to see.
It was always hot out west and I would always bike down to Jack Carter to swim in the pool and buy lemonade from the dell man and his blue van. My cousin and I were pron to sneak out, but one day a cruiser pulled up and reminded us non-local youths that there is a curfew.
Neighborhoods were being built every day taking away all the pastures of long horns and horses. It was too busy, too fast for me on the LBJ freeway.
I made some friends, did some runway, got to meet some fancy names and wear fancy clothes, but the catwalk was not for me. I wanted to take my shoes off and run barefoot.
I headed every summer when school was out to sunset beach. It was there I could smell the ocean and dive in. My folks rarely saw me appear on 29th street until way after supper had sat out.
I loved to walk across the inlet on low tide. It was there that the sea birds migrated. I was always the only human watching them in their own fragile sanctum.
These are some of my memories that I love to recall. This is parts of my journey home.