There is a snapshot of my mom, my brother and me standing in front of the first house I remember. I was two when we moved there, five when we left, and Jim was a year and a half younger. The place had an acre of ground with a little orchard of cherry trees, a chicken house and chicken yard, and right behind the house a huge silver-leaf maple tree, where my dad hung a rope-and-board swing for us. Between the tree and the house was a high cement deck that served as a back porch.

I have just fragments of memories from there.

Gathering eggs from the wooden nests against the wall in the chicken house, and the day we found newborn kittens in one of the nests.

The times clouds of flying ants would invade the maple tree and we had to stay off the cement porch for a  few days until they disappeared.

The big floor register between the living room and dining room that brought the heat up from the basement. How I cried when I dropped my favorite barrette, a little red dog, down through the grate and it was lost in the workings of the furnace.

Several cats, and one black dog named Sport that we eventually had to give away because he was always getting out of the yard, chasing cars and bothering people.

Jim cutting out countless pictures of automobiles from old Saturday Evening Posts and lining them up along the baseboards, the beginning of his lifelong obsession with cars.

Mom reading to us at bedtime—Little Bear, the Mother West Wind stories—and then hearing our prayers before we went to sleep.

Going for rides on Sunday afternoons and stopping on the way home for ice cream cones.

Having to take naps when I wasn’t tired.

Learning all those bewildering lessons of how to be and how not to be, what was and wasn’t good behavior. You don’t look at a picture of yourself and say, “How cute!” You don’t ask the neighbor lady if you can have the little toy houses on her shelf. You don’t sit like that with a dress on. You don’t get into cupboards when Mama’s out feeding the chickens. And just because you know the truth about Santa Claus, you don’t need to tell your cousins.

When we moved from that house it was because it was time for me to start school and there was no school close by. So we moved to another home and began a new chapter of our childhood.