Meandering down Memory Lane after Midnight

Well. The two little boys we keep from time to time (I really need a better name for them, any suggestions?) ended up coming over last night instead of tonight, and they are here until Sunday night (last time they were here until Sunday night that ended up being until Monday late afternoon), which put me in speed mode, as there were still cookies to bake, laundry to fold, toilets to scrub, and clutter to put away before the singing tonight, and all my biggest helpers were gone- some to help Strider clean up and pack his apartment, some to work, and Pip is being obsessive compulsive about schoolwork.

So, naturally, with so much cleaning and straightening up to do before tonight, it makes perfect sense that at midnight, after the boys finally went to sleep and everybody else was in bed, I settled down to clean out a filing cabinet drawer that wasn't doing anybody any harm at all, and which I apparently haven't looked in since four years ago when Granny Tea cleaned our her house and handed me a huge box of letters and pictures I wrote and sent them when we lived in Okinawa back in the second half of the 80's.

And I couldn't sort without reading, could I?

I read about the HG biting the EC hard while we were driving somewhere in the car- a totally unprovoked bite, and when asked why she did it, she answered very matter-of-factly, "I suddenly wondered if it would hurt her if I bit her. And I found out it did."

I read about the Equuschick tenderly caring for our sick dog after his heartworm treatments, bringing him pillows, dolls, and solicitously covering him up with a blanket and 'reading' him stories. She was three.

I read about the Equuschick going out to my garden and picking every last stinking tomato on my first plant- when they were all green, and how I cleverly punished her for that by making her eat one of the green tomatoes. Oh, so clever. Because she did quit picking my tomatoes. After that, she coerced the little neighbor boy to pick them for her.

I read about the HG and the EC getting in a loud fight, with the HG roaring at the EC not to tattle on her. And when the EC came into the room where her father and I were, all thoughts of tattling were completely erased from her mind as she was utterly distracted by the oranges we were eating. She was always easily distracted by food. This state of absent-mindedness was clearly a great relief to the HG, and the EC could not remember what it was she was going to tell us, so interested was she in her food. Her relief was short-lived, however, as we insisted that she (the HG) tell us what the EC had been coming to tell us. After hemming and hawing and insisting there wasn't anything at all to tell, a crafty expression swept over her face, and enunciating carefully, the HG told us, "She was coming in here to tell you that I did NOT hit her."

I will stop there, not because there isn't more to tell, but because Pip will be back shortly from her walk with the boys and the D-man dog, and I will have no more computer time to speak of. But one of the many things I found interesting about those letters is how many of the funniest incidents I had completely forgotten. Another was how well the letters illustrated a phenomenon I have already seen with my own mother.

My mother has often said to me that she doesn't understand why my children (when they were smaller) were so destructive of their toys, so careless, so prone to breaking them. "You children," she would say, speaking of my two little brothers and I, "Were much more careful with your toys. I don't remember you being so destructive."
And yet, if there is one constant thing I remember from my own childhood, it is my mother saying to us, "I don't understand why you three are so destructive. YOu just do not take care of your things. When I was a child, we appreciated our toys and took good care of them. We didn't destroy them like you do."*

Your memory apparently grows rosier as the children grow, because I do not remember the HG and the EC fighting much, and yet the letters I perused last night were full of accounts of sibling squabbles. There were sweet tales of sibling affection, too, but far more squabbling than I recall. I remember only sweetness and light, with one or two spectacular incidents of sibling tussling (one ended with one child with a fistful of hair, and the other child with her hand caught tightly in a drawer, which her sibling was holding firmly shut so she couldn't yank out more hair). And that's not quite the way it happened. Before too long, I suppose, I shall be telling the grandchildren, "I don't understand why children argue with each other so much. Your mothers never fought when they were little." And their mothers will be rolling their eyes at each other behind my back, and saying, "That is not what you told us when we were little!"

*Incidentally, I found out this rosy memory of her own childhood was not altogether true when I inherited the Rattery and contents, which included a goodly number of their toys- toys which were broken, colored on, books that were scribbled in, illustrations defiled with mustaches, and toys which had clearly been put to usages other than that envisioned by their designers. I also realized that toys back then were much sturdier than the gimcrack junk that is made today, so it was harder to break them, giving the illusion that one was more careful with one's toys than the children of today.

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