Essay Three: Three to Six, 1949-1952

After the rabies episode, I lost much of the baby fat that I ahd, and was fairly thin until past high school. I was little but tough, and loved being a tomboy. It seemed that I could do anything. I was flexible, and double jointed, at least my fingers were. My index finger could be bent backward to touch the back of my hand. Kids in the neighborhood were amazed by that. Running and jumping were my passions, and jump rope and jacks were delightful.I loved comic books and learned to read by age 4. My older sister Rosalie taught me, giving me one of her school books to read. I was a voracious reader, and finished it wanting another. My family moved to the suburbs of Houston, to a house with screened in porches front and rear. The front porch had a porch swing; the back porch was as big as a bedroom and Mother put two twin beds with cast iron ends in it. There was a huge old pecan tree in the back yard, which dropped loads of papershell pecans every year.

It was a corner lot, with I entered school late, as my birthday fell in October and I began at age 6. Still, most of my classmates were bigger. The smell of crayons and sharpened pencils became like one of my favorite scents. Butterscotch and brown dresses were my passion, and plaid was the pattern I liked in fabrics. Life was idyllic and sweet, as I walked to school in the mornings, stopping to suck the nectar of honeysuckle flowers that vined up the lattice of an old ladie's garden. The big oaks and crunchy leaves in the park just down the street from the school enchanted me. Life was a fantasy and I was a precocious little girl with light auburn hair and green eyes. The school was Elizabeth Barrett Browning Elementary. This was where my awareness of female potential first began developing. It was great to go to a school with a woman's name. I read of her life and her poetry, her illness and her great love expressed poetically. Those innocent days of girlhood were filled with the joys of the outdoors, squirrels in the park, hot chocolate, comic books, games of hide and seek, playing jacks, hopscotch, reading, drawing, painting, and learning embroidery. The variety of embroidery stitches amazed me. It was a world of design with needles. I embroidered on pillow cases and on linen doilies for the furniture. And in my sleep, I dreamed of flying, lifting my self into the sky by simply floating up and then gliding about over the heads of people still on the ground. I loved those dreams and wondered why people could not experience that kind of weightless flight. Silly girl, completely.