Day 26: A Childhood Memory

A childhood memory.

My thoughts shift back through times immensity.
I’m back in Etoile, Texas. Five years old.
The house is off the road and into thick trees in every sight.
Thomas is eight, Tristin is eleven.

Moved here for Daddy’s job. Another move, will we stay?
School’s a blur, I don’t like it here. The other students are strange, I miss my old best friend. The teacher here doesn’t really like me. I guess transferring in during the middle of the year tends to have that effect on everyone.
My room is filled with toys everywhere. Disney dolls, and action figures, Lego's, and play doh. Winne the Pooh covers the walls. The three of us play basketball, or I watch the boys rather. We go on excursions in the massive backyard. Daddy’s mostly at the furniture store in the next town over. Months go by. Time stands still.
Flash forward.

Moving van, packed up yet again.
Another house, another town. Will we stay?
The drive is long. About eight hours.
The hills have disappeared a while back, all the trees have now vanished and we’re in what seems like a flat desert land. We arrived at destination desertion after dark, and dead tired. No time for exploring the new house, no time for debating who gets what room. Time to lay a mattress down in the back room and camp out as a family. The next day’s a disappointment. The house isn’t exactly as great as the previous one’s we’ve had. It needs a remodel. Badly.

Unpacking, moving boxes are everywhere. Stacked up high in the carport. Momma and daddy tell the boys to start moving them inside. I grab my little bicycle and start to ride it around up and down the drive way. Momma tells Tristin to watch me. While trying to show off my mad cycling skills I managed to run into those boxes, slid across the pavement, and skinned my forehead. Tristin panics and picks me up, tells me not to cry and carries me off to the back room. He tells me not to tell momma, and not to fall asleep, because I might have a concussion. Although I didn’t know what that word meant, I knew it sounded scary. For the next few weeks it took to heal, my bangs managed to cover it up nicely.

That’s all I remember from that, momma didn’t find out that that actually ever even happened until a few years back. Thirteen years later, and we’re still living in that house. After moving all around Texas for the first five years of my life, we finally settled in an area where it would be the hardest for us to fit in.

Sometimes I wish we didn’t move this far away from everything.
We traveled to Tyler, Texas at least once a year, up until recently. I wonder about how much I missed out on from moving. How my life could have been, should have been. I miss the family, all the cousins, aunts, uncles. Growing up without grandparents has always left me with wondering how that could have been. I’m curious to know what conversations and lessons I’ll never have. I absolutely love older people. I love hearing about there lives and what crazy shananagans they did back in their day. They are so wise about everything, and have some of the funniest jokes. I bet my Grandma had a thousand stories she would have told me.

Anyways, there’s my childhood memory. Sorry if it wasn’t that great. (: