Remembering

So...based on comments made on and off the blog, more than yours truly is trying to figure out how to make their own lace fence a reality! :)  We have a 5-foot chainlink fence around the backyard, which keeps the deer out and the boys (our Weimies) in. It is so industrial-looking...hmmm. What if I wove white plastic strips in and out...or used string to 'crochet'... Husband is not big on what he calls "Artsy-fartsy" stuff, so I'm not sure how much I can push the envelope. It already looks a little cluttered and Victorian-y back there. (I've got a thing for raised beds, trailing rose bushes, statues and those wire Eiffel Tower-looking pedestals.)

The Mama has been trying to figure out the exact year of a camping trip we took to California back when I was in middle school. We finally settled on a date -- the summer of 1970 -- because of a strange, isolated memory: we were on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, and I remember seeing boat after boat containing groups of American Indians. Mom or Dad asked someone, and they said matter-of-factly, "Yeah, all the Indians are going out to Alcatraz."

I'd thought we went to California in 1968 or 1972...but the largest (and longest) occupation of Alcatraz began in Nov. 1969, and kept on for nineteen months. (You can read the 'official' version, courtesy of the National Parks service. But I'd recommend this much more personal account, too.) To a little Michigan farm girl, this was all incredibly exotic, from shrimp cocktail to something she'd never seen (or smelled) before -- the ocean. Oh, and did The Mama remember Indians in sailboats from that summer?? Not at all...

Memories are made of such strange stuff. Why do we keep one thing vivid, and forget the rest? Why does someone else at the very same spot and place in time remember totally different things? I am constantly amazed at what Daughters #1 and #2 consider important about their childhood; many times, they bring up items I had forgotten all about, or dismissed as trivial. (Thank God they don't seem to remember the times I blew up at them out of frustration or fatigue...times I am ashamed of now.)

I'm grateful for them, though. (The girlies and memories.) They keep you sane during restless periods, and reassure during times of stress. This Too Shall Pass, they whisper. And they're right.