Can you imagine the sound of a photo gliding out of a Polaroid instant camera now that I’ve suggested it?

That’s how I remember my childhood, in snapshots and with that sound. Sometimes its dust particles in a sun beam that takes me back, back to the first time I really noticed them. I was at Gams house in her good living room. She had a big window, where the glass lamp always was, and the sun would cast beams through its globe. I was there sitting on the floor, cross legged and with an encyclopedia on my lap. She had the only set of encyclopedias in town that I knew of, and I had a report due nearly every day…a lie of course, but it got me over to her house and oh how I longed to be there. I’m a little bit sorry for the lying but it wins my argument that sometimes a lie is necessary. To keep from hurting someone perhaps or necessary in this case because it got me more time with her and not a total lie-because I really did look things up and write about them-but mainly it got me to her.

It also got me a piece of leftover cake from Sunday that sometimes might last until Wednesday! She’d be humming somewhere in the house or outside among her flowers. A sweet house sitting right in the middle of our little town, with a white fence lined with daffodils on three sides of her house and yard. I lived next door, in the house she was born in. I am her granddaughter, and my father is her youngest child. She had twelve! She was my friend and advocate, and she saved my life-more than once.

These are my memories and I’m going to take you through them with me…