Early Memories

I have one early and very persistent memory. It would flash into my mind unexpectedly and I could never quite place what it meant. I could see a light; way up high and just below it would be a large shape with criss-crossed legs. I was visiting my mother, one day, when her next-door neighbor Mrs. Shoemaker came over. I was in the final months of my first pregnancy. “Betty Jo, there is something I want you to have” she said. “It is the changing table your mother used for you and Mary Lou. She loaned it to us when Sonja was a baby, and you might like to have it for your baby, too.” She went home and brought back a folding table with a canvas top. Instantly, my memory came flashing back, only this time I could place exactly what it was. It was the changing table, of course, with its crossed legs. High above my two-year-old head was the light coming through the window in our playroom. In front of the window stood the changing table. I could even hear my baby sister crying. I know that Mary Lou had a serious ear infection when she was very small. The Dr. had to come and lance the eardrum, and before that operation she had cried incessantly, according to my mother. I wonder if this is the time I remember. A photograph of me sitting on that table is in my baby-book, and I had certainly looked at it many times in my childhood, but I had never made the connection that came to me so vividly that day.

Another, clearer, memory must be from when I was about three, as we were at my grandparent’s home in Sedro Wooley, and they came to live with us in Seattle when I was three or four. I am in grandma’s yard. She grabs a chicken by the head and swings it around to wring its neck. I can still see that chicken running around all over that yard. We probably had chicken for dinner that night.

I remember very little about my maternal grandparents, as they both died in 1938 when I was four years old. My grandpa Steele was blind. He had lost the sight in one eye when a sliver of wood flew up and hit his eye when he was splitting firewood. Then, when he was older, he suddenly lost the sight in his other eye. He used a cane when he walked. When my grandparents came to live with us, Grandpa liked to take walks down Third Avenue, and I went with him, holding his hand. I was not allowed to go as far as the corner, but when I walked with Grandpa, we could go clear down to 65th and even across the street. There was a grocery store on that corner, and that may have been our destination. Beyond the grocery store there was a hedge bordering the sidewalk. It was way over my head, a solid wall of green, as we walked past. When I grew older, I sometimes walked that way to school. I was always surprised to find that the hedge was not very tall at all, certainly not much higher than my waist when I was in the sixth grade.