There is the remainder of a set of plastic foods from my childhood at my aunt teri's house:
a chocolate cupcake, a vanilla cookie, a green icing, a pink plate.

they, like the rest of her house, have been a constant in every family get together since i can remember. we used to dig it, along with other various asundry toys we can all remember more clearly than what we ate this morning, out of the milk crate plunked down in the middle of the living room and just spend hours playing with it.

hours.

then we would run out to the old, rusty jungle gym or play hide-and-seek in the garage with who-knows-how-many spiders and dangerously sharp, broken, and rusted objects. it was more fun that way.

and nothing has changed.
everything in that house is exactly as it was fifteen years ago; slightly more worn, yellowed to the point of being brown, but exactly as it was. nothing new has come in, nothing old has left, like an enormous formaldehyde bubble settled in around the place somewhere around 1982 and hasn't budged since.

so it is only natural that every time we reconvene at the house we, that is, my cousin brantley and i, reminisce of the good old days when adults didn't exist and, while every other age group of kids had a gathering of at least three, we only had each other to keep ourselves entertained.

but we were never bored.

and we still aren't, spending hours talking of our childhoods and the looming future and everything in between.

and now there is a new crop of children, a batch of two-and-three-year-olds produced in the most part by the older cousins, beginning the circle anew. they don't have the milk crate and many of the best toys are long since lost: the scraggly monkey with velcro on its paws, the naked doll whose eyes were supposed to open and shut but one was always stuck, the colorful plastic box with holes cut in squares and triangles and hexagons through which many an amorphous object was shoved through.

they aren't allowed to play in the shed or the broken-down rv or swim fifteen at a time in the jacuzzi. they won't ever know maw maw and paw paw or their house and all the glory of running through the trailer to play with the ancient stuffed animals or making mud pies in the red clay or the perpetual attempts to sneak onto the broken down boat that had never seen water in its life.
and that makes me sad.

i'm reminded of a tree grows in brooklyn, a great deal, actually, whenever we go back. but i wouldn't trade it for all the world. the memories we all have, ranging from the tragic and traumatizing to the sweet and nostalgic to fall-down-and-wet-your-pants hilarious, are what have shaped us into the people we are today, for better or for worse.

i have a tendency to forget the great things when i'm away, made only easier by the fact that bad news is the only news worth telling through the familial grapevine. but every time we come back, without fail, i realize how glad i am for my family, for with the hard partying and often lowered social status comes a sense of fun and easy banter with a sense of humor somewhat unique to my family alone.

though i'll freely admit to wishing said serious problems into non-existence, i wouldn't trade trade my family or my upbringing for all the world.

while the reminders are all around us, the physical remains of our childhood still lie strewn across the den, just as they always have:
a chocolate cupcake, a vanilla cookie, a green icing, a pink plate.

seemingly silly playthings from long ago, these are the containers of our childhoods.

ink :: graphite