I was thinking the other day, or remembering, actually. While reading Ilium , I came across a funny moment, where a Greek soldier is ordered to hand over all his armor and clothing to our naked hero, right down to his underpants. The soldier is admonished to "kill all the lice" as well. Yuck. I had a good laugh, but this immediately triggered a memory of my childhood.
I don't remember my age, maybe 5 years, when I was in kindergarten. I got the lice at some point, from some kid, somewhere, and roughly the memory was of a woman washing my hair and treating me for lice. We were in her kitchen, and she was massaging the magical anti-lice shampoo through my hair, and washing it out it the sink. Now, I don't remember her name, or even her relation to me. She was not family, but I know that me and several other children were bussed over to her house after school. I attended Riverside Elementary in Snohomish, that much I remember, but I don't know who this woman was. I remember she had a husband, or perhaps her father, who didn't hear to well, and didn't seem to do much other that sit at the end of the couch, watching 'Wheel of Fortune'.
After school, me, and sometimes other children were dropped off at her house. Sometimes she would make an egg-salad sandwich, most time is was just cookies and juice. I was always a cookie dipper then and even when all I got was juice, I still put my cookies in. There was a very small room just off the kitchen with a small old couch, the kind that was scratchy to the touch, colored dark brown and orange, and a very small television. We would watch Woody the Woodpecker, or Tom and Jerry in the afternoons, but we couldn't take our treats into the room, if I remember correctly; we had to eat at the table in the kitchen.
The house was an older two-story home, plus an attic I think, painted green with white trim. The garage was detached, and inside was the all important box that controlled the electric fence surrounding the small field behind the house. The fence was always on, it kept the cows at bay apparently. I was a curious child and grabbed the electric fence at least once, I remember it was an amazing feeling, like my very atoms were afire. There was a safety handle you could grasp to walk through the fence, but it was extremely low-tech, and strung very tightly, one slip and you'd zap yourself. To this day, I'm quite afraid of electric things, especially car batteries, with both positive and negative post exposed, waiting for a slip up
They had a long, narrow garden to one side of their house, the first time I ever saw a live sunflower. I don't think most people see them in real life, and my memory of it is pretty amazing. They are quite large and large. In the winters we would get a good blanket of snow, sometimes several feet deep, and back then we did all the usual fun things in snow, like snow ball fights, snowman building and snow-forts. And between the house and dirt driveway, was a lone, large tree. I'm not sure of the type of tree it was, but I would guess it was Oak, or at least, Oak-like, and it was replete with a tire swing. Several other trees on the lawn were good for climbing, which the boys did as much as possible.
Now that I'm going back through this memory it seems like there was a lot of fun to be had back then. She had a neighbor that I think was her daughter, who had a son a bit older than I, and we would play, and it seems as though I have a memory of a birthday party. It seems they were more than just babysitters, although I still cannot remember who they are, and how my mother knew them..
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