Scorpions and Cherries
One of the benefits of having been a military brat is having been there, done that. I was chatting with a colleague about the vagaries of military life, and assuring her that it had done me no harm to move while I was young. She is waiting for her husband's first orders, packing house, and torn between excitement over this next phase in life, and concern for her young children. I have been trying to gently tell her it will be all right, they will look back on diverse experiences with no regrets. We moved a lot, although much of that was my parent's itchy feet. In fact, by the time I was 18, I’d had something like 19 addresses. Dad got out when I was 10, but we moved three more times after that, for family reasons. Since I was born days before he was formally enlisted, I never had any comparison.
Dad was stationed at Homestead, down on the tip of Florida, when I was very small. My earliest memories are from that time, before I was in Kindergarten. My sisters were both born, but my youngest sister was a babe in arms (and although something was known to be wrong with her development, it would be years later before a proper diagnosis could be made) and my middle sister was a toddler.
I must have been a troublesome child. My memories of this time are flashes, rather than clear narratives, but looking back from the perspective of motherhood, I wonder. I can remember being out in the mangroves, and knowing that my mother wound up in the hospital from sunburn - no-one thought through the reflection of the sun from the water, and although she was wearing a hat it still got pretty bad. But I don’t remember that part, only the water and the mangroves.
I remember the coral. The first time I ever saw a scorpion - I must have been 4 - was under a chunk of coral that was being used to line a flower bed (I’m a bit fuzzy on the details of this, although I vividly remember the small sand-colored arthropod). Dad turned it over and showed me. He must have known it was there, and trusted me not to try and pick it up. I had that coral until I left home - a rectangular grayish white chunk, the shape of a pillow and the size of my two adult hands together. It’s funny - I remember the scorpion, and the fire ants, and the cherry tree, but not necessarily what my parents looked like at that moment in time. My mental image of them is from much later, from the time shortly before I flew the nest.
Even the day I blundered into a fire-ant’s nest and ran crying for home, I can’t remember my mother’s face, only that she chased me right back outside. I’d run into the living room and was standing on her prized new Persian rug shedding ants! I can’t remember the feel of the bites, only my consternation over having been scolded and then allowed to undress in the backyard.
Memories are a peculiar place. You can’t live there, any more than you could dwell in framed snapshots. You can only revisit a moment, like the time I took my sister and we both climbed up into the big cherry tree next to the driveway and ate until we were sick and covered in bright red juice. This wasn’t the last time I towed my younger sister along on my wild adventures! We were boon companions for many years.
We left Florida when I was in between kindergarten and first grade, I think. I’m a little fuzzy on what happened when, but I do know that my first official school year was in uniform at a tiny academy, and that was in Eugene, Oregon. I don’t really remember kindergarten, because I was a year ahead of my cohort, and reading already, and I remember learning a little Spanish. That’s all. And as I’ve talked about before, I don’t remember learning how to read. I just did, and it must have been in Florida, because the ages line up. I regret that we have lost almost all the family photos. We had many, many pictures at one time. Dad was a shutterbug, something he passed onto me. However, as Benjamin Franklin famously said, three removes is equal to a house fire. Which, doing the math, is something like 6 fires in my lifetime to adulthood. Losing things was the norm, not the exception. I don’t think I still have anything that dates back to Florida. Other than the memories. I have those, and now that I have written them down, I shan’t lose them.