In an effort to chronicle my life for my children and grandchildren, and also to hone my writing skills, I've decided to begin a weekly feature titled True Story Tuesday. In it, I will share, ahem, a true story about my life.
In a creative writing class years ago, my professor shared these words of wisdom: "Don't assume it's interesting just because it happened to you. It has to be interesting because you make it interesting through your writing."
Here's hoping it's interesting to you, dear readers.
Yellow
The first thing that comes to my mind is waking up in my own bedroom.
See, when I think back on my childhood, there are an overwhelming amount of memories...some very, very good ones and some very, very bad ones. I've told parts of most of the good ones many times to whatever poor soul would listen--my kids, my husband, the dog. But it's very hard to narrow it down to the ones that are worth actually sitting down and hammering out in writing. In my megalomaniacal mind, I want to write my whole fascinating life from start to finish. But how practical is that? I know that it's impossible to tell them all, so I'll just tell them as they come to my mind.
I don't know if there was a particular thing that made me feel the way I did that day, but I remember it so clearly that I think of it often, probably once a week. That seems like a lot, but I really do. Maybe I think of my childhood more than most people, I don't know. But I probably recall some bit of my growing-up daily. So much of it affects the way that I relate to my own children and the things that I do for them, and there are things about being a kid in that house that I will never, no matter how hard I try, forget.
But on the day that particular day, I woke up in my room and felt so very fortunate. Even blessed.
I don't think that I was very old, maybe ten or eleven. It's hard to tell, because I spent a lot of time changing rooms in our ranch house on Hartville Road. Since I was an only child, and there were three bedrooms in the house, I switched between the two smaller bedrooms often. It was always so exciting to me to get a new room, like a new world, and to change the view out my bedroom window.
On this particular day, I was in the middle room. The bathroom was directly across the hall from me, and my parent had the bigger room that was attached to the bathroom. I probably spent most of my growing up in this bedroom, because I know that it's the bedroom that I lived in until I moved all of my stuff out of the house when I turned eighteen. Most of my memories come from that room. So, maybe after about ten or eleven, I stopped moving from room to room. Anyway, for the sake of clarity (which can be dangerously close to the same thing as inducing boredom), I'll name the rooms, which we didn't do when I was a child, but it will make it simpler now.
The back room, where I spent a lot of time before I was 10 or so, was mostly pink. After I moved out of it, it became my mother's sewing room. While it still had a twin bed in it, it wasn't really used for sleeping much, except for when I may have decided to sleep in it for the night, just for the sake of novelty. I seemed to like to sleep in a lot of different places, including the bathtub, which was one of my favorite weird-kid rituals, taking all of my pillows and blankets and sleeping in the bathtub all night. I don't know why I did it, because I always woke up many times in the tub uncomfortable and trying to work the kink out of my neck enough that I could go back to sleep, but I often went back to that weird-kid ritual and my parents always let me. They would even come to the bathtub to tuck me in. I guess they were kind of weird parents, too.
So, the pink room was the sewing room.
My room, and this is what I remember about this particular day, was the yellow room. It had yellow-ish wallpaper (though later, or maybe earlier...who knows?...it changed to a different kind of wallpaper. More about that in another post), green carpet, and--and this is the part I remember--yellow princess curtains.
Now, maybe I was influenced by the movie The Little Princess with Shirley Temple and how she woke up the morning after that mysterious Indian guy next door granted her wish, and how she woke up and the first thing she did was run her fingers along the edge of the luxurious linens. I don't remember if I'd seen that movie recently on the day I woke up in my yellow room, or if I had even seen it at all, but that morning, the sunrays came streaming through those yellow princess curtains, danced upon my eyelids, and gently roused me from my sleep. I lay there in the warm sunlight, looking at the sweet color, that happy, sunny yellow of the princess curtains, and I suddenly felt very blessed. I don't know that I can explain the feeling much better than that. I simply felt as if I were the luckiest girl in the world, and that my room was the very prettiest, very sweetest, very most princess-est room that ever existed, and that I was so fortunate to have such a magical and royal room.
Looking back on it, I think it was the beginning of a love for the simple and bucolic. My room was not at all fancy. Most likely, my mother had made the curtains herself or bought them at the discount department store where we often shopped (which was later turned into a K-Mart, and then into something I can't remember, and is now a small strip mall), but there was something about that sunny yellow color that made me very happy. Actually, yellow still makes me very happy, and yet I don't have a single room in my house that has a single wall painted yellow.
Maybe it's just too sacred, that color, and is to be reserved solely for that bedroom in my mind and the reflection of the sun off of the yellow maple leaves in the autumn. Whatever the reason, yellow lifts my spirits and makes me think of that inspiring day when I was certain that I was a true princess, and nothing in my world could go wrong.
So, I was thinking today about the things in my life that create strong moments, and I was applying that line of thinking to my marriage. What do I do with my husband that makes the time fly? What do we do together that creates a strong moment in our relationship which, in turn, builds our relationship into something stronger? As a result, I sent my husband an e-mail at work that went a little something like this:
