It's a meme if you want it to be: Pick a month and year (as far back as you remember clearly, or the one after that, etc.), and write down as much as you can remember (within reason). If you enjoy remembering all the details in answer to these questions, you're doing a history project that may help writers in the future. If you don't remember them, but instead remember things that cause you pain and grief, you have the option of writing something else--what you've learned about the treatment and avoidance of the disease you had, or what you remember about the person you'd lost, say. Or just fast-forward to a month of better memories.
As a meme this is about history, not about personal affairs and feelings, and certainly not about the lives of other living people (unless they're playing along with you and want their stories told). People whose roles in my memories might be recognizable are probably dead. I recommend writing down the answer to "What do you remember about me?" with a pencil, on paper. "During this month my son was born" or "During this month we were married" is enough for everyone else to know.
1. Which month and year is it?
The writer known as Priscilla King has a real date of birth, which is confidential information that should never be disclosed online. The brand called Priscilla King was created in the summer of 2006, so the brand's real age is now going on nineteen years old. The brand was, however, "born" somewhere in the vicinity of forty years old; at sites that insisted on displaying "birthdays" I have virtual birthdays in 1961, 1962, 1963, 1965, and 1967. The 1965 birthday would make me exactly forty years old for part of the year 2006. Is it the closest to my real birthday, which is not any of those virtual birthdays? I'm not telling. This is the month of January and/or February and/or early March when I was five years old, too young to keep track of precise dates on the Ramon's Brownie Calendar on the wall.
2. Where are you?
In an old farmhouse a mile or two further from town than the house where I now live. The house is large, but we've rented only two rooms of it; the owners have stored things in the rest of the house. We're only staying here until another house is ready to move into. Most of our things are in storage, and we've not connected any utilities.
The road that leads up to the farmhouse is a footpath, not wide enough for motor vehicles. Possibly that's why nobody ever wanted to rebuild the two houses below it that burned down long ago, leaving foundations and gardens behind. Only one family still lives in a house on this road. They live right at the corner where the footpath branches off above the paved two-lane "State highway," and keep pigs, which is all we want to know about them. We hurry past the nasty hog pen outside their house. After that the walk up to the house is pleasant and scenic, with three places to ford the stream on stepping stones--no bridges--and sections that offer a choice of walking close to the stream when the water is at normal levels, or higher up its banks after rain.
I'm not sure how the toilet works in this house. It's in an outbuilding but my brother and I are allowed to use a long-gone patient's potty chair in a closet. It is possible that this house has an outhouse that pollutes the water just downhill from an artesian well. Nothing was built right over the stream, but the outbuildings aren't as many yards away from the stream as an outhouse ought to be. I don't need to know. There is some reason why none of the nice family who own this nice house want to live in it; why they'll rent it, very cheap, only for short-term use. Dry-flush toilets aren't on the market yet.
Last year, some relatives of mine rented these rooms for a few months. Much later a neighbor will remember having seen a little girl who looked like me waiting for the school bus. I don't go to school from this house. Three girls and a boy who look a bit like me, but are older, have left their books in these rooms. They used the Ginn readers and Laidlaw English and science books; by the time I go to school we'll be using the Harper & Row readers, late-boomer editions where Dick and Jane have been replaced by Janet and Mark although they still say things like "Look, look, look. See the tree," and newer, more colorful English and science books. I love to read, and understand much of what I read. I learn about correct grammar, about saying "can't you" instead of "canchew," and about volcanoes and bacteria and how to wire a lamp, and never going to school if you have a cold. The math books they used are beyond me and I can tell I'm not ready for eighth grade physics, but my cousins' books make eighth grade physics sound like fun.
Finding a Laidlaw English and science book (for a different grade than the cousins' books) at a sale is what brings back these memories, in 2025.
3. What are you wearing?
Probably pull-on pants and a jersey sweater. Maybe a jacket or cardigan if I go outside. I don't remember a particular pair of shoes, but I remember little white socks that all looked alike from a distance but had to be sorted out and paired up at close range. I hate socks.
4. What are you eating?
Our first meal in this house was Campbell's tomato soup with Ritz crackers, heated up on a wood stove; the room was still cold enough that the soup continued to steam after it was cool enough to eat. Mother is a diligent fire keeper, though, and that's the last time the house will be cold, even when snow lies on the ground.
After we've moved into this house Dad finds a a part-time job, one week every month, distributing free food to poor people in town. At this period of history the people in charge of such things think they know what all the poor people should eat--the same thing for every one--and want to make sure the poor people eat what they have prescribed for them, not wasting any money on less nourishing meals. At the end of his week's work Dad always brings home cartons of unclaimed food, because the poor people in town don't want to bother to come into town and get it. It is not very good food. It includes powdered milk, powdered egg, rat cheese (the kind of cheap cheese people put in rat traps), white flour, cornmeal, oatmeal, white rice, tapioca, some canned fruits and vegetables that aren't usually very bad, some canned meat that is disgusting, some peanut butter that comes in cans and is also disgusting, and the best part: the check to take to the store and use to buy better food.
Mother takes the rejected food as a challenge. A good cook can make these rations into meals people will want to eat. Mother can, most of the time. The secret is to use mostly better food. If you put on the table some nice bread, some fresh milk that has not been powdered, some Campbell's soup, some oranges, some disgusting peanut butter in a can, and some rat cheese, for example, your children can have a nice lunch and completely ignore the rejected cheese and peanut butter. Rejected oatmeal makes acceptable cookies if you use lots of nuts and raisins. White rice makes a good pudding when every grain of rice is surrounded by a spoonful of custard. The meals Mother makes out of these boxes of rejected foodstuffs are not cheap, but they do get some of the rejected food into us children. The poor people do not have to eat it. Dad's boss does not have to send it back. Everyone admires Mother's cooking skills. Everybody is happy, sort of. Only some of the rejected food has to be given to animals. Later I'll know people who are quite well off, who think nothing of taking surplus food from food banks to supplement commercial feed for their animals, and I'll not feel that it's a sin to give surplus food to animals either, but my parents seem to feel guilty whenever we take rejected food to the hens.
The store is about the size of the main room we use in the house. It has room for only one brand and flavor of everything but, since Dad recommends the right brands and flavors to the storekeeper, we usually feel satisfied with the results of a visit: Hershey's cocoa powder, Kraft marshmallows, Roman Meal bread, Dole pineapple, Carnation evaporated milk for Dad to put in Folger's coffee at breakfast, Sanka decaffeinated coffee he drinks during the day, etc. However, Dad prefers that we wait till he can get into town and buy groceries from a cousin's store, which is only about twice the size of the one near the house. They are the same groceries. Dad says we should always buy everything from the cousin, even if he can't buy it in bulk and give us the best price, just out of loyalty.
5. What's in the news?
At this time in my life we don't get a lot of the news. There's no television or radio. The house has electric lights and places to plug in a radio, but no current flows through them. We don't subscribe to a newspaper, either. We get some newsletters and magazines when Dad picks up the mail from his mother's house in town, after work.
Dominoes are in the news. If you stand dominoes, the toys, in a row and knock one over, the whole row will fall down. Our young men have to keep fighting a war overseas, although it has nothing to do with us, because if one foreign country falls to our enemies, the others will too, just like those dominoes, and then, by adding some more little countries to their existing bulk, the two countries on the map that look biggest will finally be bigger than we are by enough that they can gobble us up. Why would they want to do that, when they are so far away, and why haven't they done it yet, if they want to do it, being so much bigger? Money, my parents say. Wars are always about money. We have it. They want it. They are godless and will steal if they can. Dad never gives up hope of reclaiming the word "communist" to refer to communalism, the philosophy of communards, who choose to live in communities and share things like the early Christian church. I don't learn the phrase "godless Communist" as if it were one word; I'm told that what Russia and China have is socialism, but the Cold War is definitely on.
Another word in the news is Woodstock, which is the pet bird of the cartoon dog in the comic strips. Snoopy the dog types stories, so probably he named his bird after his typewriter. It'll be years before I read the rest of the Woodstock story.
Another word is "satellite." A satellite is a thing that goes around and around another thing. The moon goes around the Earth. The Earth goes around the sun. Apparently quite a few younger siblings of children who are reading about satellites go around and around their older siblings. My brother has not yet become my buddy. A few times a day I tell him he's being a pest.
"Satellite, satellite,
The Moon goes around the Earth.
Satellite, satellite,
The Earth goes around the Sun.
Satellite, satellite,
I have a little satellite;
My little brother orbits me
And pesters day and night."
It's true, but laughing about the silly poem seems to make it easier to bear.
"Eclipse" is in the news, too. I read about how an eclipse works. I don't see it happen.
Our President's name is Nixon. No one seems to like him much. Our Vice-President's name is Spiro Agnew. No one seems to like him at all. He doesn't think much of young people. I am young so I don't think much of him either, nor of Nixon, but Dad thinks the things people say about Spiro Agnew are funny. Once last summer on a road trip he and Mother sat up, apparently all night, laughing about the trouble the Vice-President was in. We children laughed, too, until we fell asleep. All Dad had to say when we stopped laughing was "Poor old Spiro," and we'd laugh again. What kind of trouble was it, actually? I don't know. Probably something to do with money. Dad says Spiro Agnew is not as bad as most people say he is. This is probably true. It would be hard for anyone to be that bad.
And India and Pakistan are at war with each other, too. We're not on a side; we have family friends from India, who've gone back there by now and whom I'll never see, and also some from Pakistan, whom I've met but barely remember. The Pakistanis had had trouble buying a house, even though they were doctors and had plenty of money. They were very nice, paid a good price for the house, and gave us rich gifts. On the other hand the Indians were like brothers and sister to Mother, and might actually have saved her life.
There is also a country called Rhodesia, which news reporters pronounce "Road-hesia." We don't know anybody there or know exactly what they're fighting about.
There is no right side of a war. War is always wrong. Dad reads about the war between his and Mother's friends' countries, aloud, at the table, so I'll know what a bad thing war is. I'm left to read about the war in which American young men are fighting, when some of them sell articles to magazines, by myself--if I can stand to. They don't merely list body counts and damage to places. They describe injuries. Mostly I don't read those articles. They are too disgusting.
6. What are you reading?
In addition to the cousins' last year's schoolbooks I've brought a few books of my own to this house: storybooks, and a few volumes of my Golden Book Junior Encyclopedia. My favorite, though, is a paperback novel Dad picked up in town because it had a horse on the cover. Horse stories are supposed to be wholesome stories for children. Mother is not really horsey, but most of her family are, and as we're in Virginia now they think I ought to be growing up horsey too.
Actually I'm starting to reconsider my feelings about horses. A horse comes with this house. She lives in a barn at the far end of the back yard. When the weather permits, the owners of the house take the horse, or mare actually, out to do some work. Her name is Maude. Everyone says she is a good, gentle old mare but the only time she ever seems to live up to this reputation is the time I don't uncurl my fingers in time, while handing her a carrot, and she spits my hand out with only bruises on my fingers. Another time when I'm riding past her on Dad's shoulders, Dad leans over so I can pat Maude's glossy black coat and she pivots on her forefeet and kicks, just missing us. "There must have been a burr or a bee sting or something. She's not usually like that!" but I have no other memory of patting her when she was not "like that." Then there's the time she bolts while towing a load around a field on what books call a sledge, and local farmers call a sled--a low rack of flat heavy boards nailed across runners, wide as two or three Western Flyers. Depending on the load this kind of sled can be hitched on to one horse, or two walking side by side. The path is narrow. The hillside below it is steep. The sled is a snug fit on the path at best. Whatever the owners are hauling on the sled, and a hired boy who's supposed to be holding it on, take a roll down the hill. (The boy is apparently able to get up and go home. At age five I don't even wonder whether he had to walk, or rode home on the sled behind Maude.) Lovable old Maude, in short, seems dangerous enough and this makes me wonder about ordinary horses who are not said to be especially good, or gentle, or old. I'll always have warm fuzzy feelings about horses but I'll feel no need to own or train one.
Nevertheless, most of my storybooks are about horses, and this winter I'm enjoying Born to Race by Blanche Chenery Perrin. A girl does such a good job raising and training a foal, which happens to be a Thoroughbred, that at the end she's made a Kentucky Colonel so she can watch her horse win the big race. I don't know that I believe that anything like that ever has happened or ever will, but I enjoy running and racing around like a horse. I can always win a race with my brother. I look forward to moving closer to town, going to school, and racing with people my own age.
Also during this winter we buy enough Carnation milk to qualify for a copy of the Carnation children's cookbook, now a collector's item. We even test several of the recipes.
7. What do you see around you?
Whenever possible I take my book out on the porch where the light's better. The yard is small, unless you count the steep slopes of the hills that surround it. The house sits in a small pocket of flat land near the top of a cleft between two wooded hills.
At the far corner of the yard an artesian well spurts out of a rock in the hillside, forming a small waterfall. We catch drinking water in the waterfall, store milk in a watertight cooler in the pool beneath it; in wet weather the water pours out of it with a sound and fury that frighten me, and my parents laugh. Children have reasons to be wary about things that don't seem frightening to bigger people. In spate the waterfall probably could have washed me off the stepping stones below it. Even if I was really more than five years old this winter, even at nine I wasn't very big.
At the far end of the yard is Maude's barn, and the henhouse where our hens live. The hens aren't allowed outdoors because this is not their home and we might lose them. I pick chickweed, grass, and clover to take to them. Maude, however, is allowed outdoors and sometimes comes up to the house to look at us when she has nothing better to do. What she is looking for is something different to eat. She likes salt and might eat a sweaty cotton shirt. Being a horse, she can digest pure cotton--eventually. It seems to upset her for a few hours but does not make her really sick.
We are still at this house when spring weather arrives. This probably begins in the March thaw, but most of it surely happens in April.
8. What are you learning?
In addition to the cousins' schoolbooks, this winter I learn to place other countries on the globe, having already learned to place the States on a map. I am soaking up information like a sponge.
A modern English version of the New Testament called Good News for Modern Man is being put together. We are acquiring it, book by book. Dad starts saying that I read well enough, now, that I ought to read the Bible. Sometimes I read the Book of Revelation; its images seem awesome to me, like the waterfall in spate, but I can't say I understand it to mean anything except that St. John had an awesome vision.
When he goes into town and collects his mail Dad brings back mail, now including a full-color, slick-paper magazine, put out by preachers he used to know in California. Their correspondence is often about orphans in poor countries. Some might say that two people trying to rear children on the wages of one part-time job are poor. Dad says we're obscenely rich compared to those orphans, and still scrapes out money to send them. Some of the worst places for orphans are India and Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam where the war is, almost any place in Africa, Bolivia, Mexico, and some of Dad's correspondents say some cities in the US, too. Some people like to "sponsor" orphans chosen by country; if you do that your orphan will have to write you a letter every month about how grateful he or she is. Dad doesn't have a preference as to country. If we could, all of us would like to be able to help all of them. So at least we're spared from letters in which orphans have to say they're grateful for a bowl of rice, without even salt, much less custard, being given them every single day. We have to look at a lot of faces, mostly of girls about my age and size, with different skin tones but all apparently selected for having big dark eyes. I'm told to remember them, pretend they're my friends or even sisters, whenever I want things we can't afford. The preacher in California who has actually adopted a lot of orphans of different colors is not a friend of Dad's, and won't be infamous for a few more years, but the idea sounds nice.
9. What do you believe, and why?
Arguments about religious beliefs swirl around me. Dad is always explaining or correcting or questioning something about the Bible to some other man who's studied the Bible at length. I couldn't make head or tail of it if I tried, which I don't.
I know, though, that the farm and the hills around it were made by a Power beyond human imagining. I can't say what the Bible tells us about that Power, yet. I probably could say, if asked in the right way, that I'll never be able to believe that my homeland came to exist by chance.
10. What songs are you singing or listening to?
The only music at this house is what we make for ourselves. Long winter nights, we watch the fire flicker and die out, and sing, and tell stories. My parents have lots of stories to tell. I don't have many stories to tell, yet, but I am being deliberately taught to tell my stories: "What do you remember about that summer, that place? Surely you remember..." My brother has hardly any stories at all, but he wants to tell stories, even if his memories don't yet make stories worth telling.
There is, however, a songbook at this house--one Mother used at school long ago. She didn't learn most of the songs in the book but we sing some of them, and some songs we sang along with records when we had a way to listen to records.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb8AGuD2uOI (Children understand things differently. What this song brings to my mind is that section of the road leading to the farmhouse where the road--a footpath, really, at that point--splits into two paths, one further uphill than the other. We sing it cheerfully while walking briskly up the road.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mr03En-8fH8 (The school version left out all the verses about Betsy's and Ike's relationship. In the first verse it affirmed that Betsy crossed the wide prairie with her uncle Ike. The song was about the hardships of the journey. A few years later I learned that that's not the way the original song went.)
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